Oh crap! - A studpid mistake requires some assistance!

[DannJonnes]

Hey guys,

Some of you will shake your heads and roll your eyes. Others will laugh at me. But I made a major mistake and I desperately need your help. My plan was to reformat my primary hard drive to reinstall Windows XP (I hated vista). During this process I thought I was deleting a secondary partition on my primary hard drive. That secondary partition ended up being my secondary hard drive which contained an insurmountable amount of important data and memories. My question is obvious.

How do I restore my lost files to the secondary HDD? Currently I reinstall XP on my primary but have left my secondary just deleted. I have NO created a new partition nor have I formatted my second HDD.

I have looked at a couple of solutions but most of them require a high purchase cost or just don't seem to be what I am looking for. Any help is GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[MustISO]

As far as I know there's no way to restore the partition information but since you only deleted the partition and haven't formatted the data should be easy to recover. Check out a tool called GetDataBack. There are probably a few others but I've only used that one.

 

[DannJonnes]

I am currently doing a scan with GetBackData and it appears it will be able to recover my files, thank you. But I am curious because it appears I will have to transfer the data from my secondary HDD to a separate HDD. This is impossible because I have over 800GB of data on my secondary but I do not have another HDD that can support that amount of data.

Any ideas on how I can keep the data intact on the secondary HDD? Remember the secondary HDD information has been deleted but not formatted yet. Also any ideas on an open source version of this software?

Thanks

 

[themisfit610]

Whatever you do - don't try to recover the data in place. You will bork things up very badly.

Bite the bullet and go buy another drive You did something stupid, and if you want the data this is the only way to recover it AFAIK

~MiSfit

 

[DannJonnes]

I was told I could do a quick format. This keeps the data files in place but changes the volume name? Is this possible? Will this "bork" things up? (hehe). Im just trying to avoid buying another HDD. Money is tight for me since I have a 3 week trip planed to travel to Peru on a medical trip.

 

[BlueAcolyte]

With a Quick Format it is POSSIBLE to recover the data, but how do you think your hardware will react when you recover data that's not supposed to exist? You're lucky you can get it back, bite the bullet and take the opportunity to get a Samsung or Hitachi 1TB drive.

 

[DannJonnes]

Originally posted by: BlueAcolyte
With a Quick Format it is POSSIBLE to recover the data, but how do you think your hardware will react when you recover data that's not supposed to exist? You're lucky you can get it back, bite the bullet and take the opportunity to get a Samsung or Hitachi 1TB drive.

The HDD I messed up is a 1TB. I always could use the extra space but I don't have the money or the actual need. All I am trying to do is find all the solutions possible. It may come down to me purchasing another TB HDD but I would prefer to avoid that.

 

[DannJonnes]

I've attached several more external HDD and I am backing up all the information to several sources. Looks like things are going to work out. Thanks for all the help.

Just for a reference I used Recover My Files and the program worked amazingly. Thanks again.