HELP!!! Data recovery from formatted hard drive??

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ahmad

1937 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 53
Inactive user

#16383 7-Oct-2007 07:52

Oh dear. To cut a long story short, using the command prompt loaded with a Windows 98 boot CD, I ran "format drive:" on the wrong drive (because of drive letter allocation issues).

I realised immediately and powered off the computer at 1% done. I don't know if that was the thing to do but I freaked out.

Surely the data isn't all gone?

Your kind assistance will be truly appreciated

I'm even happy to pay someone if that's what it would take, as this is a complete disaster (that *was* my backup solution :/).

Edit: The lost drive was NTFS formatted. The "format.exe" that was run on the drive was from the Windows 98 CD. Does that make things even worse? :/

nick2184

1 post

Wannabe Geek

#90055 8-Oct-2007 10:16

Hello Ahmad,

You can try NTFS Data Recovery Software. I suggest you to run the demo and see the chances of recovery. Free demos usually only show you the files names that can be recovered, I would recommend you to unplug the drive and connect it to another computer to perform the recovery from.

Whatever the software it might be, though, an important point to remember here is that when you download the program it is best saved on a disk other than the one you hope to recover data from or you could be permanently erasing recoverable data

ahmad

1937 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 53
Inactive user

#90091 8-Oct-2007 13:45

Update: Thanks everyone. I used GetDataBack and successfully recovered all my files after installing Windows onto my primary hard drive (this was the second hard drive). Windows allocated "d:" to my 2nd hard drive, and e: to the 2nd partition on the first drive, which is what cause my initial problem - I presumed a different drive mapping order.