Deleted Partitions and Reformatted HD - Need to Recover Entire HD

phuschnickensphuschnickens Beverly Hills, Michigan Member
edited June 2008 in Hardware
I deleted partitions and reformatted an entire hard drive. It was the wrong one. I need to recover the ENTIRE disk now. Am i SOL??? I feel like a moron.

Comments

  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited June 2008
    Am i SOL??? I feel like a moron.
    SOL? Probably. Are you a moron? No. Mistakes like that are unfortunately easy to do. Buy insurance after the car crash? Too many people do that. Consider purchasing an external hard drive to perform routine system and/or data backups.

    Now that you are upset with me for not positively (positively, as in 'happy') addressing your problem, here's a possible solution. You can try using GetDataBack. If that doesn't work, you are probably left with only one other option - hiring a professional data recovery service. I don't know how valuable your data is.

    If you ran a full format, versus a quick format, your probability of data recovery is lower.

    Wish I had better news for you.

    Do get yourself and external drive. You can use a pre-made kit or buy a separate enclosure and the drive or your choice, PATA or SATA.
  • phuschnickensphuschnickens Beverly Hills, Michigan Member
    edited June 2008
    Thanks for your kind words... I kicked my ass for 8 hours instead of 24.

    I tried 5 recovery programs. All recovered the partition with music (least important).

    The 1 program that was most effective is called PhotoRec, which comes bundled with TestDisk. It's an open source, rad program. It can be used on a variety of OS's and a variety of file system types. For Windows, it runs an a cmd window, and has a very crude GUI, but is fairly snappy with getting the job done. The program's recovery is based on filetypes, but the list of filetypes that the user can turn on/off is very long. The only major drawback that I saw is that PhotoRec renames all directories and files. I was able to recover Outlook's PST file, which other program's did not find.

    thanks for the help y'all

    phu
  • _k_k P-Town, Texas Icrontian
    edited June 2008
    The other thing I have tried is ERD Commander, takes a long time but has a lot of neat features. It boots off of a disk and allows you to do a lot of repair on windows and the harddrive as well as rebuild partition tables and recover formatted data. The only other program I have used that I like and is easier to use is ZAR, zero assumption recovery, nice little GUI interface and its fairly fast.
  • phuschnickensphuschnickens Beverly Hills, Michigan Member
    edited June 2008
    _k_ wrote:
    The other thing I have tried is ERD Commander, takes a long time but has a lot of neat features. It boots off of a disk and allows you to do a lot of repair on windows and the harddrive as well as rebuild partition tables and recover formatted data. The only other program I have used that I like and is easier to use is ZAR, zero assumption recovery, nice little GUI interface and its fairly fast.

    Thanks
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