Can anyone please help me. I was reformatting my computer and I have an external hard drive attached and the computer must have thought that it was the D drive and completely erased everything. It made two drives and one of 16 GB and one of 134GB. I wrote a copy of Windows on the 16 GB drive and erased the 134 GB drive and put a few files there. Please tell me there is some way of recovering it. I am not holding out hope, but I can't bare to think that all my files are gone.

Edited May 11, 200818 yr by cleary71

I reckon you may be able to recover some of your files. Probably first thing I'd do is disconnect it and start having a look around for recovery tools. I know there are a number of freeware and shareware ones, although I don't know of any off the top of my head nor how well they'll work. Get your system running, install a few tools you like the look of and plug your drive back in and see how you go!

Also (and probably obviously) don't write anything to that drive! Have some space on another hard drive to copy the recovered files to.

Edited May 11, 200818 yr by JedMeister

I was able to connect it to my laptop and run some free demo versions of recovery software. The only things every one found was the files that were newly written nothing that previously there.

11May2008

Greetings.

I can relate the following -

I found that freeware recovery apps

are not too powerful.

File Recovery 2.0 impressed me

in how it handled recoverying

normally deleted files.

I found that the DEMOS from

Runtime.org: GetBackData,

EASUS: ?

& Virtual Labs: ?

could find lots of files after

XP decided to run chkdsk

at a reboot & deleted all files on my external HDD.

The apps with demos cost around ±$100 ...

I wasn't about to shell out to try to recover

any of those files ...

Fortunately, I lost nothing of value ...

lots of files, yes, but neither irreplaceable

nor of significant value ...

No freeware apps could find any files

on that HDD that XP took the liberty to destroy.

Some freeware apps might find some

files after accidental reformatting ...

or so they say.

Regards,

AEN

Æ

I was able to connect it to my laptop and run some free demo versions of recovery software. The only things every one found was the files that were newly written nothing that previously there.

Which software did you try? How many different ones have you tried? Perhaps you need to try some more. Be aware that you may need to decide how much the files are worth to you (ie be prepared to pay for a good recovery app). Many of the pay ones will only allow you to search (and don't let you recover anything until you pay), others will let you recover a limited number of files or a limited size of file, etc. I just had a quick google and there is heaps of different software available. Have a look here. Make sure you list what does and doesn't work as this will help others in the future with simmilar problems find the solution.

Good luck!

RStudio works wonderfully.