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Data Recovery: Help Needed

J

JOSEPHLB

Banned
Ok.. first off, it was foolish of me to not have backed up my information.

I mistakenely formated a hard disk, without further evaluating what I really should have done.

I have 2 hard disk drives..

C: which is an NTFS partition loaded with Windows 2000 Server
D: which was a FAT32 partition, which was just holding all of my files, downloads, etc..

My goal was to format the C: drive, and install Windows XP. The mistake happened when I inserted the wrong CD in the drive.. I inserted the Windows 98 cd. Of course, as many of you know, it will not recognize NTFS partions.. so, it assiged the first FAT32 drive it saw, as C:, which was really D: , that held my information... and of course.. the rest of the story I'm sure you can figure out..

My question is: Is there any possible way I can recover my D: drive, and the information on it, prior to the format? Are there any software utilities I could try to reverse the situation? I greatly appreciate any assistance.

 
If you've merely FORMATTED the drive but haven't yet written new data to it, you may be able to recover your old data. There's a very slick program by OnTrack (www.ontrack.com) called EasyRecovery Pro. The software is far from free (perhaps $500 - $600); however, it does an amazing job. Anyway, before you shell out a dime for the program, you can download the TRIAL version which will identify what data may be recoverable (but won't actually recover the data).

I'm sure there are less expensive programs out there; however, when I merely had my FAT TABLE overwritten, the only program that was able to recover my data was Ontrack EasyRecovery Pro. (I didn't even reformat my drive).

If you've written data to the disk since it's been formatted, depending on how much data that was, you may or may not be SOL. Good luck.
 
Thanks 🙂 Those were the two programs I found lastnight after my research.

Still trying to find a fully functional demo that will enable me to recover my data.
I know its important not to write any information to the drive I want to recover..
 
Well... being that I can't afford one of those fine programs.. I came up with another solution.
I did recover about 16.0 GB of the 18.0 GB that was on the drive.. so I'm pleased.

I ended up booting up a Windows 98 cdrom.. went to the command prompt, with Cdrom support.. swapped that cd out with my Norton Systemworks 2002 Pro cd...
browsed to the D:\NU\ folder.. and ran the UNFORMAT utility...

Suprisingly, it worked 🙂

Now I just need to save up for a DVD-R drive, then this situation wouldn't have happened in the first place

 
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