DELL laptop WDC SATA HDD struck after installation of xp

[stranger4w]

Hi guys,

I had windows xp sp2 installed on C: drive of my dell notebook having NTFS. whilst reinstalling windows xp i mistakenly formatted drive C on FAT32 and after reinstalling i was shocked to see that windows was asking me to format rest of drive before use. I realized my mistake and reinstalled windows on C by formatting on NTFS this time but of no use. Tried few of data recovery softwares but none of them were of any help.

i have very important official data on drive D and E. how can i get my data back? any help friends?

Umer

[jono-ats]

If you did a LOW LEVEL format of your drive, you are out of luck.

If you did a quick HIGH LEVEL reformat, your data should be there, and any competent data recovery program should work.

[stranger4w]

Thanks for reply buddy. i didn't do low level format. it was actually quick format during xp installation.

but i think changing from NTFS to FAT32 damaged the partition table/ structure. i believe that data is still there as i have not over written something.

Advise some.

[poehere]

OK from what you are saying you have only worked on the C partition of this drive and have not even touched D and E so you data should be intact on D and E

Now clone this drive to another drive and stop playing around with this and installing again windows on top of all this you are just over writting your data even more.

Then get a good recovery program and mount your cloned drive to another computer and use this recovery program to get back your data.

[stranger4w]

Thanks dude.

I'll give it a shot later tonight.

[ishaali]

please tell me maximum Hard disk support by dell laptops as i want to buy 4TB for Dell Latitude?

[HaQue]

Hi, look on your label on the back, find the service tag, go to your product page at DELL and look at the specifications.
BTW, there are Hundreds of Dell Latitude models going back over 10 years... might want to narrow it down a smidge...

[Matiw]

If your laptop is not too old and if it is external Drive, (not a boot drive), you will have no problem using the whole 4 TB as a single partition, even using NTFS parition. Those new external drives use 4k Sector size, and you will not be affected by NTFS partition size limit of 2.2 TB. But, if you want to use the whole drive as a boot partition, you should format it using GPT, and use an operating system that supports GPT.

But, if your laptop is too old, you might not be able to use the whole drive as a single partition.

please tell me maximum Hard disk support by dell laptops as i want to buy 4TB for Dell Latitude?

[HaQue]

Maybe search forums for your exact model and see if someone has done it. Sometimes it is only a matter of "try-it-and-see" because future product compatibility is very wide ranging.