Ok well last night I did a major screwup by being careless and not double checking myself around my own equipment while working on a friends PC.

I have a 750GB seagate that had my life on the drive. For the past 2 years I have filled it up from the 160 I pulled from a previous drive, to the now large ammount of about 680GB of data.

Last night I backed up some files on this PC for my friend, and forgot to unplug or shut off the drive, I boot the XP setup and see a drive with a 7 in the MB number.... I was wondering why the number looked a little big but It didnt hit me until after I deleted the partition (Wish i caught myself at least here) repartitioned a 300M partition (left the rest untouched) and quickformatted that partition as well as allowed it to install 25MB of windows data before I knew what I did and scrambled to hit the reset button....

I seriously had my worst nightmare come true since I have never had great luck with data recovery being more than a bunch of giberish files or incomplete, bad names, or otherwise gone files save a few pics and recycle bin giberish that can be renamed and restored.


Anyway I really am ---> <--- This close from sending out the drive to some pro's to see if it could be restored to at least close to pre partition messing state.

I want to give it a wack and recover data myself If at all possible. I am hoping that the repartition and the few files coppied to the drive didnt completely distroy an entire 680G filled harddrive. Sadly atm I have been working with a few programs. One actually finished a scan which is called EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard. Which was able to detect (from what it can tell) my previous partition but when i looked at the files, the only ones in a recoverable state that arent raw are all the files I have deleted quite a while ago. A decient number of the raw files worked but were so mesed up in finding ones that were good to the ones that werent I decided to go back and try a differnt option (check the $MFT Only box) and see if that did anything to help. ITs almost done but it is still building a RAW File Tree....

I did go out and purchas another 750G seagate to recover the files too. And am testing it with a similar experiance in a controled manner. I setup the initial partition just like i did with the last one 2 years ago, then I put about 20G files on it folowed by deleting the partition and repartitioning and quick formatting 300G of it.

I am testing a program called Ontrack Easy Recovery Professional which a lot of my friends are recommending and have good experiances with in the past. So far it found all the files I coppied to the drive but at the same time I wonder how accurate this test would be without me installing a few windows files just to make it more complete.


Anyway There is my story. How does my situation sound? Is Ontrack the best choice or does anyone have any similar experiance with their drives and a better program to use?

This Was my backup drive in such a way that my primary drive in my main PC was only windows and installed programs. This drive held everything i have downloaded, created, and edited over the past 10 years of collecting. (abut 500G+ over the last 2 years alone. I like to download and do DV)

So now I definitly will be doing a backup of my backup after this, but I neeeeeed my data back.

I seriously am pissed about this. I am a professional system builder and IMO a good Windows, hardware, and just all around great tech guy. What pisses me off is i let meself slip up like this when I always took the neccessary precautions time and time again everywhere else. Goes to show you even the best of us can be distracted during hard times. I am atm involved with Finals, was doing a Online Quiz, am thinking about the friends system, was just soo distracted I screwed up... Never again will i not double check the #'s 6 times before I hit delete.

I am sorry about that man. When you feel a bit dizzy next time, stop whatever you are doing, take a walk on the balcony, take a few deep breaths and then return to the PC. It seems that the 10 minute break that opthalmologists suggest every 1 hour on the PC does not help at your eyes only! Clears your head too!

And of course we will say it once more... BACK UP BACK UP BACK UP...
Can't wait for the AI system that will do everything by itself. Know which files to back up without telling it, and update some of them without creating new ones. One day mate... one day!...

I am not sure you will be able to recover all your files, Once i had to recover my accidentally deleted files using this free software http://undelete-plus.com/files/undelete_plus.exe. It's easy and free give it a try. Good Luck

Use Runtime.org's GetDataBack for NTFS.

It should be able to recover everything that wasn't actually overwritten.

Download the demo version, it can analyze the drive and show you what it can recover. If it looks good to you, then you pay the $79, enter the license key, and proceed with the recovery.

I have had good luck with Ontrack Easy Recovery Professional and File Scavenger. LOL

Deleting a partition and then creating new one with a quick format should not overwrite the data. Installing windows does overwrite. So there will likely be be some data loss when you try to recover it. A program that I've used for data recovery and had good luck with is called R-Studio. GL

I to have used NTFS (^^^)It recovered most of my files after a failed MBR . The person who I took my drive to who does even more repair than I do said that he sometimes does a quick format first and that way it will "search" for files. Again, don't know but thought I'd throw it out there.

Does anybody have any experience with this stuff that they would like to share? Like: i've done this but it does not work well for these files? When I got my recovery I had a lot of the same files listed again and again and only some of them worked. I lost half my MP3's because I was to lazy to back up. Just wondering if any one else had first hand experience to share.

Well when something like this happened i recovered most of my files otherthan my autocad dwg files .... a nightmare