NEED HELP! with hard drive recover

[nedney]

So in an effort to rid my new Thinkpad of Vista, I accidentally erased and reformatted my external hard drive, thinking I was reformatting the onboard one. In summation, 47 GB of music and videos down the toilet. Anybody got any suggestions as to how I go about recovering some or all of this? I have all the music and videos on my iPod, so if anyone knows of a reliable program I can use to safely move them on to my computer, that would be very helpful as well.

 

[CDC Mail Guy]

Please define "accidentally" GetDataBack for NTFS works well for me, but I have never tried it on a formatted hard drive.

 

[Old Hippie]

GetDataBack for NTFS works well for me, but I have never tried it on a formatted hard drive.

I'll second that emotion. If ya hadn't formatted the drive, you'd have a much better shot.
Try the program for free.

Good Luck!

 

[corkyg]

A lot depends on the type of format you did. If it was Quick Format, chances are the data was not overwritten. Full format is probably a lost cause. But, it costs nothing to look.

There are several offerings to transfer data from iPod to computer. Here's one:

Xfer

 

[Tiamat]

Oh man, all I can say is that I feel for you. It is most likely a lost cause if you did a standard format

 

[ForumMaster]

Originally posted by: corkyg
A lot depends on the type of format you did. If it was Quick Format, chances are the data was not overwritten. Full format is probably a lost cause. But, it costs nothing to look.

There are several offerings to transfer data from iPod to computer. Here's one:

Xfer

why? there are free options. first of all, all the music and video's are already on the ipod. they exist. the only problem, is that itunes renames them to a 4 letter word. so what you do, is copy them all to one folder. clear your library in wmp11. add it all. then, go to options, and in the library tab, check the "Rename music files using rip music settings". WMP11 will rename all your files according to the rip settings. since the metadata is still there, that's what it will use.

 

[nedney]

Yeah, I did a full reformat. What happened was I was trying to put XP on my Thinkpad, and Windows Setup wouldn't read the hard drive. So, thinking I would try later, I plugged in my external hard drive to look at my firefox extension list. Later, I called Lenovo support and they walked me through some basic tinkering in my BiOS (I should have known what they did wouldn't fix it). When I tried to boot from the XP CD after that, Windows Setup could see the drive. Of course, I had forgotten that I had plugged in my external hard drive, but that's what it was seeing. So I erased and reformatted the drive, thinking it was the Thinkpad's internal drive. Only when I returned to my laptop, expecting to see the XP setup screen and instead seeing the Vista login screen, did I realize what I'd done. Bummer, huh?

 

[corkyg]

Yeah - that's a bummer for sure. But - you have the iPod - and it may be a PITA but at least it is a solution.

 

[nedney]

Originally posted by: corkyg
A lot depends on the type of format you did. If it was Quick Format, chances are the data was not overwritten. Full format is probably a lost cause. But, it costs nothing to look.

There are several offerings to transfer data from iPod to computer. Here's one:

Xfer

Media Widget worked like a dream. Got all my videos and music back. Thanks a lot!