Oops, I formatted the wrong drive

[MUKid]

Is there any way to unformat a drive that I just accidentally formatted? It is a FAT32 partition that I haven't done anything to except format (ie, no fdisk, no new files on the drive).

Thanks.

 

[LuckyTaxi]

oh man...i feel for ya

 

[Bojax]

Try this out

I havnt used it, but others have with success

 

[MUKid]

Thanks, Bojax! That looks like exactly what I need.

And lilcam, fear not, it's not actually my hard drive. It's a friend's, who was trying to install WinXP and formatted the wrong drive. A word to the wise - XP may, for no particular reason, reassign drive letters so that what used to be your "C" drive is now your "D" or "E" drive. Beware! This can easily be avoided by just paying careful attention to your options when XP asks if you want to format a drive. (This is what happened to my buddy - he formatted his "backup" drive instead of his main drive.)

Thanks again.

 

[yanon]

Try Ontrack's Easy Recovery or Lost and Found (I forgot who makes this one).

 

[Farm]

Well, I'm the affected party. MUKid posted for me while I was beating my head against the wall earlier in the day.

The problem came about when I tried to format C: for use in XP with NTFS formatting. The formatting created an error and stated that it needed to install to another drive because C: may be damaged (which it wasn't). So, I exited the install and went to DOS to see if formatting the drive (which at this point was still full of data) in DOS would help the XP installation. What I did realize is that when XP was unable to format C:, it became unreadable to DOS. SO, Dos assigned my other drive (D: with all of my valuable files) as the "new" C:.

So, without realizing it, when I typed "format C:", I was actually formatting my old D: and in the process deleting all of my critical files.

This is when the head beating began.

I reformatted C: and XP installation was fine then.
I downloaded GetDataBack as linked to above and it worked perfectly. I identified all of my old files on my old D: and I was able to restore them and carry on as if nothing had happened, well except the $69 charge for the program, a charge I feel is well worth the excessive pain I was going to feel when my wife got home.

So, all is well I guess. Without that program I would have been up a creek.
Just thought I'd give an update to the group.
Thanks for everyone's help,
Chris

 

[RobSan]

I would say the lesson you just paid $69 for was well worth it. Always label your drives to that you know exactly where you are.

 

[CQuinn]

<< XP may, for no particular reason, reassign drive letters so that what used to be your "C" drive is now your "D" or "E" drive.

<<

It has a reason, but XP (and 2000 for that matter) doesn't need as much to
care which drive letter is which, since it uses a different method to find
it's files at bootup.

A piece of friendly advice: I always try to label my drives with the same
first letter as the drive letter "should be" under DOS/Win9x.
Ex. - C drive is "Cool", D Drive is "Dawg" etc...

That way I have a secondary way to tell which partition is which before
I do anything with them that I might regret later.

 

[MGMorden]

This is one of the reasons I've always had only a single hard drive in my machine during a 2000/XP install. I've never lost data because of the drive letter reassignment but having the OS be on E: is just disconcerning. Gets me all confused in the long run .

 

[kursplat]

kind of sounds like XP started to convert to NTFS and got just enough done to make "c:" unreadable to DOS. so on the reboot, to format in DOS, all the drive letters moved up one spot.
glad you were able to save it.