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WTF Winflash? You write over hard-drives?

B

Blakestr

[H]ard|Gawd
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Somehow when I was making a Win 7 Bootdisk for my wife on a flash drive, the wrong drive letter got selected and it appears it formatted my 1.3 TB home media server data? WTF Winflash. Now my hard drive appears as it is a mounted ISO...(which is weird because the capacity is only 336 mb left with 3.34 gigs used...this is on a hard drive letter where the drive normally says 1.98 TB...what happened,....WHERE is my media server hard drive then? I can't seem to unmount that hard drive....but I don't want to format it. How to recover that data as well...I won't write to the drive until I know what to do...

cliffs
1. Winflash appears to have written over/hidden my Media Server drive (call it letter E:)
2. Now E:\ is the Win 7 "bootable" disk."
3. Capacity on the drive is 3.36 gig FAT32, whereas the harddrive is actually 2 TB
4. ??????

Please help.

I'm going to try a data recovery tool...should I format the hard drive back to NTFS and use a quick format? I'll wait until I hear from people here. Thanks in advance.
 
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Use GetDataBack for NTFS. You should be able to recover all of your files no problem.

Or you can use a free option, such as Piriform Recuva:
http://www.piriform.com/recuva

I do like Piriform and Recuva will most likely be able to recover all your files as well.

Here is another free one that looks like it may be good:
http://www.freedatarecoverysoftware.net/

You will need a second hard drive to recover the files to no matter what program you use. If you don't use a second hard drive, you have a very high risk of overwriting data.

The only other option is to use a Partition recovery tool, but that is somewhat riskier as it can screw it up even worse if you set it up incorrectly.

If you reformat it, you risk losing data.
 
Reformatting even on a quick format? Like back to NTFS? ......because I did that....the one thing is, I think the drive was maybe 60% full, so theoretically I should be able to copy 40 % before I start losing data? I am going to have to split it up on the other hard drives but even still I don't have much space...
 
so theoretically I should be able to copy 40 % before I start losing data?
Click to expand...

No. The corruption would have happened at the beginning of the partition where the NTFS structures are. So you will loose data there. Also reformatting may have caused more loss of data although I am not familiar with GetDataBack maybe they need the drive to be formatted in NTFS instead of FAT to be able to recover.
 
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I think the drive was maybe 60% full, so theoretically I should be able to copy 40 % before I start losing data?
Click to expand...
hard drives write from the begining of the disk to the end, so when you reformat, it will start writing from the begining of the disk again, overwriting whatever else was there. it does not start writing from where you left off before you formated.

...(which is weird because the capacity is only 336 mb left with 3.34 gigs used...this is on a hard drive letter where the drive normally says 1.98 TB...what happened
Click to expand...
thats the 4gb FAT limit.

if you are expecting to recover data- stop formating / writing to the disk immediately. do not try to change format back to NTFS before reading and deciding on a plan to recover the data. the more you write means the more you overwrite, which means the more you can not recover.
 
The question I have then is, in terms of deleting data forever, quick format or changing to NTFS, shouldn't delete anything, it will just start writing OVER everything...meaning, if I format and copy 1 gig of data to formatted drive, I will effectively write OVER the first 1 gig that was on there...

Winflash formatted the win 7 disc onto the drive (retarded I know but I guess I'm the one to blame ultimately)...that's like less than 8 gigs...so why is it I can't find the rest of the 1,000 gigs I have on that drive using Piriform?... I formatted it to NTFS but can't find anything other than 8 video files less than 8 gigs of data...am I using the file recovery program wrong?
 
The question I have then is, in terms of deleting data forever, quick format or changing to NTFS, shouldn't delete anything, it will just start writing OVER everything...meaning, if I format and copy 1 gig of data to formatted drive, I will effectively write OVER the first 1 gig that was on there...
Click to expand...

quick formatting and the initial mistake overwrote the first part of the partition destroying part of the ntfs filessystem structures that identify what blocks, along with some data. You biggest problem is the destruction of the ntfs filesystem structures. Even though the rest of the disk was not touched it may not be easy to find what blocks represent what files.

if you are expecting to recover data- stop formating / writing to the disk immediately. do not try to change format back to NTFS before reading and deciding on a plan to recover the data. the more you write means the more you overwrite, which means the more you can not recover.
Click to expand...

Agreed. The more you write to the disk the less of a chance of recovery. I would have made a bit for bit copy to a new drive and done recovery from that to a second new disk.
 
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