Accidental Format, Recovering Files.. HELP!

[vezwoarang]

I had accidentally formatted the WRONG harddrive last night and im in desperate need of help in recovering my files I was planning to format my new harddrive but instead forgot my old one was still attached and ended up formatting that AND deleting all the partitions on it as well.

It originally had 4 paritions on it all being FAT32 with the first one (C:) being winxp and the other drives (D,E&F) with personal files. Is it still possible to recover my files? or atleast scavage what ever is possible..

Right now its just an unpartitioned and unallocated 80gb.. any help or advice would be much appreciated

Edited July 28, 2006 by vezwoarang

[prx984]

theres a lot of data recovery programs, but unfortuneately, you have buy almost everyone.

i found this one

and im still looking for ya, so... brb with some more hopefully

also, if you want to look for a bit on google, theres a lot of results here

Edited July 28, 2006 by Cygnus

[vezwoarang]

That was a quick reply

My brother just gave me EasyRecovery Professional before he left to go out. While im still trying to figure out how to use it, ive got a few questions for anyone who's experienced or have knowledge on recovering files before.

1. What percentage of all the files originally will it recover?

2. For the recovered files, will they have the same file names?

3. For the recovered files, is there any chance that any of them might be corrupted?

[bledd]

did you JUST delete the partitions or did you write to them too?

if you just removed them, then testdisk will sort you out!

might fix all your problems

[prx984]

well, they could be corrupted. but as long as you didnt overwrite anything on the drive, it should be able to recover the files. im not sure of the file names, but they should remain the same, although they may not. it really depends on the program that you use. i used a program to recover files off of a floppy disk, and they didnt retain the original file names.

if you need anymore help, feel free to contact me on msn or aim or yahoo for more in depth help.

[vezwoarang]

did you JUST delete the partitions or did you write to them too?

if you just removed them, then testdisk will sort you out!

might fix all your problems

It was only a delete, havnt wrote anything to them yet. Thanx ill give testdisk a try asap!

*EDIT*Update: EasyRecovery Pro doesnt save the files with the original names, it doesnt even find .txt and .doc files which are the most important files to me.

I'll give testdisk a try like bledd mentioned, did a quick google on it and it sounds quite promising since i had only deleted the partitions and not written over them yet. Anyone ever used it before? How were the end results?

Edited July 28, 2006 by vezwoarang

[vinodh]

I did something similar and ended up accepting that I was an id***!! I used a win98 boot disc to format and forgot that my primary partition was ntfs and the secondary was fat32. That meant that win98 only saw the secondary partition and automatically referred to it as C:\ . Since all my important files was on the secondary partition, I ended up thinking it was c:\ and formatted it and lost everything. Learn't my lesson. So, if you manage to recover your files, please tell us. I need a backup plan. History is known to repeat itself!!

Edited July 28, 2006 by vinodh

[urie]

Download the demo of acronis diskdirector it has recovery expert wich will recover deleted partitions or you could try DiskPatch from this webpage.

http://www.diydatarecovery.com/

Edited July 28, 2006 by urie

[Shindo_Hikaru]

The first thing in preventive inccidents like this, following the following:

Usig Windows XP PRO

---Make all partitions NTFS, better fileing system, stable.

---Label your Drives

Using Windows 9x

---Label your Drives

[LLXX]

If you have Ghost, consider making an image of the drive first. That way you can always start off from the state just after the format if you do something wrong during attempted recovery.

[03GrandAmGT]

The best I have found for data recovery for all types of files is the R-Studio program. I have tested it on every type of file and it will recover IF you have not written to the disk. If you have written to the disk than you will lose some data but not all. R-Studio is not free but it is less than having to have somebody do it.

http://www.r-studio.com/

jd

[vezwoarang]

YES!! I've managed to rebuild my partition tables AND retrieve all my files back 100% intact! Using "Partition Table Doctor" off a slave hdd, it took only a few seconds =)

Just one last problem, i cant seem to boot windows off it and the screen just goes black. Although, i can see all my files on each partition if im booting off a slave hdd.

Any suggestions?

[prx984]

i dont think youll be able to rebuild the original install, although you might be able to, i just dont have enough practice with this.

what i would do, is load the new drive up with XP and copy back all your data and back it up on a cd or dvd.

if you have a password on your account and cant access the files, let me know about that. i had some practice with that from a friends dead laptop. ill see if i can find the software i used again.

regards

[LLXX]

YES!! I've managed to rebuild my partition tables AND retrieve all my files back 100% intact! Using "Partition Table Doctor" off a slave hdd, it took only a few seconds =)

Just one last problem, i cant seem to boot windows off it and the screen just goes black. Although, i can see all my files on each partition if im booting off a slave hdd.

Any suggestions?

Set the partition active and use fixboot command to rewrite the bootloader.

[vezwoarang]

what i would do, is load the new drive up with XP and copy back all your data and back it up on a cd or dvd.

Done! Twice!

Set the partition active and use fixboot command to rewrite the bootloader.

Since i think ive done a little too much damage to myself already, i called my brother to read the forums and help me since i didnt know what i was doing. I just wanted to write down a few system settings and from a few apps. Well it ended up booting fine like nothing ever happened at all

Partitioned my new 200gig hdd, copied all my files over, applied my settings and now im up and running again with a fresh install of windows on my new hdd. Thanx guys!