HELP! I formatted the wrong hard drive!

U

UrinalCakeMIx

Gawd
Joined
Jan 4, 2004
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578
Hey guys, Im in a real bind here, I accidentally formatted the wrong hard drive in my computer, and I lost a LOT of VERY VERY important data - 6 months worth of work - ala Audio mixing, hundreds of hours went into these, and Its VITAL that I find out a way to save my data.

In a brain fart, I formatted and reloaded XP Home on this hard drive, is there ANYTHING I can do to regain the data I lost? Any help is GREATLY appreciated, as this really is a dire situation!
 
I learned the same lesson the hard way too. now I always unplug all the storage drives before formatting my boot drive.

Anyway, I have no idea how to help you, but I’ll bump the thread to keep it at the top. Maybe somebody will know a way.

Good luck!
 
Its easy, just go and restore your files from your backups. Sorry I couldn't resist. :D

What I really want to to know how much data you lost. 10GB, 100GB, 1TB? If you had a lot of information on it, then you should be able to get most of it back with programs like the one skeeder offered. You have to know one thing though, all the data that was where XP Home now has its files is gone forever. Once a file has been written on top of data, you can't get it back.

Your best bet is to just do a google search for data recovery programs. There are tons out there and you will need to probably use more than one of them to get the best results.
 
Since you installed XP, its probably toast.

An ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure.
 
I'll be trying these when I get home from school. Any others? I appreciate the suggestions! THANKS!
 
I've Never had this problem, maybe you should actualy name your drives instead of just a letter?
 
Don't Panic!

I have been in your shoes before. When I realized what I had just done I totally blacked out cause the data I had on their was invaluable (porn clips I had collected since I was 15) lolz, no seriously it had all my school work and programs that had taken me years to write. I did have some backups but anyways... the point of this was to let you know that it happens to the best of us.

Sollution: Like others have mentioned there are tones of programs on the internet that you can download. Using them is fairly easy. In your case you might have to resort to a forced recovery and that means that your directory and file structure maynot be intact. That is you will have folders named 001 002 and so on. Some files with simlar extensions will be merged. In other cases video files me be stripped off essential components. Really depends on how much data you had.

Lastly if this all is a bit too daunting and your data is worth the money take it to ONTRACK. They are a proffesional data recovery company but are very expensive. A cheaper alternative would be BestBuy Geeksquad. But keep in my that geeksquad doesn't have many licensed tools. For $89 they will backup 4.5GB(one DVD's worth) of data. They charge $59 for each additional DVD. But that policy is fickle. Just take an external HDD and more often that not they will put it on that for you for the initial charge. But before you do make sure they understand what you have done. Sometimes they will charge you the money only to tell you that you need to get better help from someone else.

I do this for a living, if you have speacific questions you can msg me. hope this helps. Good Luck.
 
Sorry I would have posted this earlier but I was rolling around on the ground laughing for at least 3 hours after I read that Kasher_Khan had told you to take it to the "GeekSquad"

Having been a previous manager of the "GeekSquad" for a Best Buy in Missouri, I can tell you that YOU SHOULD NOT TAKE IT TO THE "GEEKSQUAD"

Try some of the freeware tools out there but be aware that you can make the issue worse. It is possible that using some of these tools will prevent a Professional Recovery service from recovering your data.

As well if the data is as important as you say it is, just make sure you perform backups inthe future.

An external HDD is cheaper and cheaper every day.

Pro Services that I recommend:
http://www.nationwidedatarecovery.com/ (They will look at it for free! Prices range from $99 to $559)

http://www.adrdatarecovery.com/

http://www.ontrack.com/index.aspx

LOL you do this for a living? What work at GeekSquad?

Sorry I see so many holes in Kashers post that I had to edit my response and point them out.

For $89 they will backup 4.5GB(one DVD's worth) of data. They charge $59 for each additional DVD.
Click to expand...

That price is for accessible data. You are quoting prices for a backup, what this person needs is a restore and a backup. Look at your price sheets and tell me if you see that service on there?
Kasher_Khan said:
Don't Panic!

I have been in your shoes before. When I realized what I had just done I totally blacked out cause the data I had on their was invaluable (porn clips I had collected since I was 15) lolz, no seriously it had all my school work and programs that had taken me years to write. I did have some backups but anyways... the point of this was to let you know that it happens to the best of us.

Sollution: Like others have mentioned there are tones of programs on the internet that you can download. Using them is fairly easy. In your case you might have to resort to a forced recovery and that means that your directory and file structure maynot be intact. That is you will have folders named 001 002 and so on. Some files with simlar extensions will be merged. In other cases video files me be stripped off essential components. Really depends on how much data you had.

Lastly if this all is a bit too daunting and your data is worth the money take it to ONTRACK. They are a proffesional data recovery company but are very expensive. A cheaper alternative would be BestBuy Geeksquad. But keep in my that geeksquad doesn't have many licensed tools. For $89 they will backup 4.5GB(one DVD's worth) of data. They charge $59 for each additional DVD. But that policy is fickle. Just take an external HDD and more often that not they will put it on that for you for the initial charge. But before you do make sure they understand what you have done. Sometimes they will charge you the money only to tell you that you need to get better help from someone else.

I do this for a living, if you have speacific questions you can msg me. hope this helps. Good Luck.
Click to expand...
 
I have a general rule of thumb, don't trust anyone else with your data, simply because the data is only important to you, the only thing someone else stands to loose from loosing your data, is your custom, it should be a last resort only.

Someone mentioned that you will not be able to recver the data that has been over written, true enough.

I use a program called Active Undelete, it is the best program I have found so far for recovering data, however it isn't free.

The thing I like is it can recover data from RAID arrays (I have a RAID 0 array and have had trouble in the past of accidentally deleting files and not being able to recover them).

I don't recommend taking the drive to a "specialist" to recover the data simply because it is so simple to recover the data your self, and unless the drive is damaged in some way, there is no reason to take it to a specialist.

Don't forget to back up, I know people have said it, I recently lost a 1.1TB RAID 5 array from a bad rebuild, I lost over 600GB of data, but thankfully I have 95% of the critical data backed up, the rest was just... ahem, "keyboard drivers" :p
 
Bump becuase I needs some help. I downloaded a couple programs, will be burning to a CD loading onto the other computer in hopes to regain my stuffs. Any more help will be greatly appreciated
 
I personally would think that a simple undelete program should work. A format doesn't over write the majority of the data, it simply erases and recreates a master file table then verifies that you have all good sectors. Any bad sectors are labeled so that they don't get written to. I'm willing to bet a good undelete program will be able to find any of your data that's not on sectors that have been over written and will be able to recover it.

I guess it's a lesson learned for you thus far. I'm with the guy who disconnects his data drives before formatting or repartitioning anything.

Good luck man. :)
 
HarvInSTL said:
Sorry I would have posted this earlier but I was rolling around on the ground laughing for at least 3 hours after I read that Kasher_Khan had told you to take it to the "GeekSquad"
Click to expand...

Read my post again!

Plz don't pull things out of context and disect them. I told him to try the online programs first and if he thinks he can't handle it ( how am I supposed to assume what his level of expertise is, I know people that think formating a drive is a challenge ) he should take it to ontrack - I did mention it was extremely expensive and depends on what his data is worth to him.

Lastly I asked him to talk the the people at geeksquad and then see if they can do it for him. And to make sure they understand his problem (i.e recovery not backup).

Yes! I do work at geeksquad, but at the same time you should know that there is no standard SOP here, I don't know what they do at your precinct. So you can't expect to know how all other precincts work. Without getting into any legal trouble I can tell you that atleast at my store we have done some serious recovery. Also I don't feel the need to qualify my self to you but before posting arogant comments don't asume you know more about a situation than the next guy.

In the end no matter how low your opinion is of Geeksquad, most of the people there work on computers every day as opposed to dealing with the occasional problem or building a new computer every few years. I don't think it's his best option. It is just an option. And the prices you quoted him are wrong. Geeksquad doesn't distinguish between a simple backup or a complete recovery. (if they do that at your store, than thats your store). In my experience most people get more for their money there than anywhere else.
 
Ahhh that sucks man. Same thing happened to me a couple months ago. Its one of those things you just have to learn from. It sucked for a while, but then instead of the crappy recovery programs I just decided to give up. Well good luck, If it was very important information, I would find a local data recovery place.
 
One thing I want to add if this data is super important to you. Get another drive of the same size or larger and use a disk cloning utililty to do a 1 to 1 clone. Not a data clone, but a bit by bit clone. If it is a huge drive, it will take hours. Then mess around with those recovery programs. If that fails, bring it to the pros to then handle it. It's not going to be cheap, but that's just how it's going to be.
 
northrop said:
I learned the same lesson the hard way too. now I always unplug all the storage drives before formatting my boot drive.

Anyway, I have no idea how to help you, but I’ll bump the thread to keep it at the top. Maybe somebody will know a way.

Good luck!
Click to expand...

Ive been doing that since I got a 2nd drive, one small error and poof there goes my data.. Im suprised this happens quite commonly.
 
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