Accidentally made my External Hard Drive a Recovery Disk

[stished]

Hi Everybody

Here is the scenario:

I was trying to remove the pre-installed Windows 8. I figured I should create a backup in case I ever have to go back to the piece of junk software. Anyway, I plugged-in my external hard drive to make the backup...

Here's the **ck up:

It said 'formatting drive'. Within two seconds, I cancelled the operation and removed the hard drive.
Now, when I try to access it (tried on 3 other laptops), it just shows the Hard Drive as Recovery Disk with some 20MB data and total 30 GB space.
Disk management shows 890 GB unallocated space.
It's a seagate 1TB backup drive. There was nearly 500 GB of data on it.

Do I need to use some data recovery program or is there another way. I don't think an entire hard drive can be formatted in 2 seconds.

Can someone please help. I can't stress enough how important the data on the drive is to me.

Regards

Stished

 

[VirtualLarry]

You definitely need to use some "deep" data-recovery software.

 

[Oldgamer]

Why was it formatting the drive? Was this a brand new external hard drive?

 

[KriB]

The tool wanted to make a bootable disk so you can run recovery from it, hence the format, I would guess....

 

[Oldgamer]

Maybe he can try this Format Recovery program: http://www.formatted-recovery.com/format-recovery-external.html

 

[stished]

Hey

Used R-studio and recovered almost 100% of the data. Just made a backup of the backup.

Cheers