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Accidently formatted HD, any way to recover data?

Last response: in Storage
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I wanted to reinstall Windows today and am sort of pissed as to what happened.

I have 3 HDs, 1 SATA and 2x PATA. My SATA is split into two partitions, C & D. C contained my Windows install.

So when I put in the Windows install CD, got to the screen that asked where I wanted to install my copy of XP. I deleted the C partition and quick formatted it NTSC.

And then I realized that f*cking Windows decided to chanage all my HD labels around. My C drive was infact one of my PATA drives which contained 300GB of data. :evil: 

Granted, the data isn't that important but I'd still like it back.

Is there anything out there that'll recover the data without costing me a bundle? I tried one app but it was $150 per 10GB. :roll:

The drive is a Seagate 7200.8 PATA by the way.

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a friend of mine (who's a techinition) has done this before on a laptop, though he had to use some illegal program he nicked of the police which they use to look through peidophiles computers. Dodgey as hell, i know, but it can be done. Theres a record of pretty much everyting that the hard drive keeps even after reformat, i'll ask him what program it is when i see him tomorrow. But it can definatly be done, others in here might have more legal ways of finding stuff though lol

Quote:
I wanted to reinstall Windows today and am sort of pissed as to what happened.

I have 3 HDs, 1 SATA and 2x PATA. My SATA is split into two partitions, C & D. C contained my Windows install.

So when I put in the Windows install CD, got to the screen that asked where I wanted to install my copy of XP. I deleted the C partition and quick formatted it NTSC.

And then I realized that f*cking Windows decided to chanage all my HD labels around. My C drive was infact one of my PATA drives which contained 300GB of data. :evil: 

Granted, the data isn't that important but I'd still like it back.

Is there anything out there that'll recover the data without costing me a bundle? I tried one app but it was $150 per 10GB. :roll:

The drive is a Seagate 7200.8 PATA by the way.


In Windows the drive letters can be changed around, but in a fresh install the drives all default to system order, drive 0 is C:, Drive 1 is D: etc. That's why when doing a fresh install all hard drives should be disconnected except the desired boot drive and a CD/DVDrom.

In a standard Format NOTHING IS DELETED! all your files are there but just the allocation table is erased. Several utilities can find those files and put them back together except any that may have been overwritten, that's why you should do nothing with the drive until an undelete utility is used.

The one I recommend is GetData "Recover My Files" I have used it to ressurect reformatted and completely corrupted drives. 8)

By the way, there's nothing "illegal" in this type of software. The fact is that a lot of data can be recovered from any working drive unless it has deliberately had all ones or zeros written to the entire drive by a scrambling utility.

Thanks guys, I was able to pull out some of the data and most of the rest was there but the file names weren't preserved and it would take me forever to figure out what's what.

But still, I'm happy with the stuff I was able to pull out since it was the stuff that'd be hardest to replace.
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