Data recovery?

[philelmer]

Hi,

I've got a USB hard drive which i accidentally deleted the partition on. In the fumbled process of attempting to receive the data I formatted an 8GB (of 80GB) section of it hoping it might allow me a sort of 'platform' to work from.

It didn't.

I've tried a couple of free data recovery tools but other than managing to retrieve a couple of individual files, i've had very little success.

Is this all beyond hope or is the data (preferably in its original format??) still likely to be recoverable?

Cheers,
Phil

[roadsweeper]

Give Active@UNDELETE a try - it worked for me. However, you need to take the hard disk drive out of the external bay and plug it directly into your computer as trying to recover data over USB is not a good idea.

[philelmer]

It's only a USB one, there's no IDE connector on it. Bit of an arse...

Cheers though. I'll give it a whirl.

[sp60]

Even though it's usb it's likely to have an ide interface on the actual drive inside the box. It's probably a laptop type drive.

I know it's not what you want to hear, but when trying to retrieve data from an HDU the last thing you want to do is write anything to it. Formatting an 8GB partition will overwrite anything that was left of the MBR and it's backup, reducing your chances of retrieval from ok to virtually nill.

Not had experience of file retrieval programs for a very long time, so only doom and gloom 'help' from me I'm afraid.

[pjskel]

Depends on what data the format overwrote.
I'm sure some files were lost, and aside from mega expensive pro recovery, you should be able to recover the rest using any software that reads the data directly on the drive as opposed to trying to piece together an index file of sorts.
Anyway, you might want to check out www.prosoftengineering.com for Data Rescue for the PC.
Equally, versiontracker.com should have a list of Apps that claim to do great and wonderful things for lost data. Some will/may, others won't - it's a matter of suck it and see.
Just remember to install and recover to another drive other than the one your trying to recover the data off.

[Scraggles]

guess now the time to invest in a dvd burner to make the monthly backups that u never bothered with before ?

formatting 10% of the drive and hoping to get anything back is optimistic so say the least

also got a usb drive that docks with baccking plate - ide drive, have it as a slave drive to recover from

bit like recording a tv program onto VHS and then wiping over the first 10 minutes and then trying to watchthe whole program, it wont work.....

[philelmer]

That WAS my backup - my laptop got stolen a month or so before!

Looks like i might just have to bite the bullet then. Bugger. Here comes a lifetime of carrying endless CDs and things around with me again....

Cheers for all the help though.

Phil

[sp60]

philelmer said:

That WAS my backup - my laptop got stolen a month or so before!

Oh man, that's rubbish
Do you store a lot of big files or is it mainly documents?
May be worth getting one of those usb flash drive thingies. Can get a 1GB for about £10 these days which should get a load of documents on. They're just a bit more robust and easier to carry then a usb hdd, and you could have a few of them mirrored as they are cheap.

If you still want to try to recover your files, have a look at this to see if it's any use: http://sourceforge.net/projects/fatfi