So, last week I did something incredibly stupid while attempting to format a harddrive. Long story short, the drive I wanted was detected, but I never noticed, because my external was still plugged in. As a result, I started formatting my external drive, which just so happened to have 10 hours worth of backup data on it.

The data is still around on another drive, and I can do all this backing up again, but....

All I did to my external drive was delete the partition. Once I realized what was happening I didn't let fdisk go any further, and unplugged the drive. A quick google search seems to indicate that there's numerous program around that'll let me recover or rebuild the partition. I'm only interested in a few things right now...

Will it work?
Will it get everything back as is? OR What's the success rate?
What's a good program to use for this?

This is almost 90 gig worth of files, and like I said, 10 hours of work. If I can avoid doing it over again, I'd like to. But if this isn't going to be worth it, I will.

Will it work? Maybe.

Will it get everything back as is? OR What's the success rate?
Depends on the type of format you performed (quick vs full),how far it got, NTFS or FAT32... Odds are, some of your data is still there, just how much, and how intact is the remaining data is impossible for me to guess at.

What's a good program to use for this?
The UBCD has a fiew good of tools to try. Other than that... I sugest Googling "Disk Recovery Tools".

I should note, data recovery can take a LONG time, probably longer than the 10 hours it would take just to re-do the backup. I tried to recover less than 50mb from a friends failed HDD (headcrash, not just a format, still) and it took almost 48 hours and we still did not get everything.

If your lucky all you did was wipe the partition table, in which case you can just re-build it. But again that can take a very long time.

GetDataBack NTFS or FAT, depending on your partition type. As long as you haven't put anything on the drive you should be able to get everything back.

You'll have to put it in empty space then redo the partition and put it back, but should work just fine.

I haven't touched it since I screwed up. Downloaded the program you suggested, ETA is just over 6 hours.

Yeah, it takes a while, but that program's saved my *** so many times.

<3 it.

Something similar happened to me. Except it involves a mysterious coworker deleting my backed up data off of the network.... so when i went to delete the previous copy on my external, the files i was planning on moving to my hard drive were gone. Thankfully a demo program was able to show me that the files still exist, but its a demo so i cant actually get the files. I would use Get Data Back, but the drive is formatted HFS for mac.

restore the original table with fdisk? If not, you're skrewed? Unless you want to wade through mountains of data to recover that one erotic jpeg? I did this once with a floppy. FAT table was botched, so i concatinated the whole disk, pageing to the ascii parts

umm... you do realize that the table is only 512 bytes?

I've done this in before. Tried to install XP on an external drive. I went way too quickly through the partitioning and quick formatted my Linux disk. Nothing showed up. Since it was a quick one, I was able to rebuild the partition table using testdisk. I rebuilt it, forced an fsck, rebooted, and was fully up and running.

Sorry, that doesn't help you much. That was Linux.

However, if you used a quick format, you should be able to rebuild the partition table. I'd certainly run chkdsk afterwards.

It will take a little while if it has to rescan the data and rebuild. If it simply recovers it, then you are right: quick.

Problem solved, thread over.

I have all my data back and the External has been reformatted. Many thanks.

Awesome! What did you end up doing?

I've always wondered how it's possible to recover data that hat been written over multiple times. You'd thing that it just be gone.

that's why that isn't what happened? Just the table was erased

Huh? Where does it say that it's been overwritten?

It wasn't. Like I said, I needed to format an internal drive (so I could stick it in an Xbox) only the computer, for whatever reason, decided not to detect it this time. Normally I have an extremely good habit of unplugging my external drive before I do any formatting, this time I didn't, and I paid for it. It got as far as deleting the partition before I realized it was working on the wrong drive and stopped everything.



Used the program Yoshi suggested. 6 hours of scanning, plus another 2 and a halfish to copy all the data back to a good drive. Everything was recovered, the directory structure is intact, it's no different than if this had never happened, and I just copied the files from drive to drive. It might have ended up taking only a few hours shy of how long it took to do the original backup, but it saved me a crap load of stress and frustration.

The irony behind all of this?

I spent a whole day working on getting that internal drive ready for the Xbox, only to find out when I was through, that it won't work, because the drive won't "lock", which it has to be for the Xbox to use it. This was never stated in any of the tutorials I was following as a possible problem.

So...

Day wasted playing with a drive that'll never work where I want it to
+
Screwing up the external drive with all my backup data
=
Really, really, ****ty day.

Bright side is I have my data back, and recently found a website that lists drives compatible for use with Xboxes.

meh, i would just do it by hand. Memorize the table and file-system formats and plug away with od and dd

(i mean, it's only a few gigabytes)

Yeah, you have fun with that. I'll take the easy way.

Do you still use punch cards too?