Accidental format of working usb drive

[Sakar]

I accidentally formatted my portable usb hard drive when attempting to reformat my internal desktop hard drive. When attempting to reinstall my windows OS with Win XP and make a fresh new system without clutter, I forgot to unplug my portable usb HDD before I began the process. I ended up formatting my my 80 gb hdd. Not sure if it was a full or quick format because I did it multiple times, out of frustration, before I realized my idiotic mistake. Long story short, I had originally put most of my information I wanted to keep on that drive and now it's lost but I'm hoping someone can potentially help me recover the information. To top off, I also apparently did a partial winXP install to the portable HDD, so I have about 1GB of new data written to the drive. I know this because Partition Find & Mount found the Windows install files on the drive :-/ any help, suggestions, ideas would be most welcome.

[lcoughey]

The partial overwrite is going to kill some of your files and very likely make it so that a lot of files will only be recoverable in a RAW format, due to the loss of indexing via the MFT (assuming it was NTFS).

Did you already overwrite the main system drive? If not, you might want to set both drives aside, install windows on a new drive and then do a full scan with a data recovery program like R-Studio to see how much of your data you can recover. Do not write anything further to either drive until you are 100% sure that you have recovered everything to your satisfaction...recovering to your new desktop drive and not to either of the original drives. This way, if you don't get good results, you can still seek the assistance of a pro. You would not believe how often we get client who try their own thing first and cause more damage by further overwriting the data with their failed recovery attempts.

[Sakar]

Thank you for your reply Luke.

I figured I had destroyed some files when writing over top of the drive. I hope I didn't do too much damage. I did do an NTFS reformat and it was in NTFS format prior to that as well. Otherwise I have not used the drive for anything else, plus it's not properly formatted yet anyway (when I plug it in it doesn't show up as a hdd in "My Computer." Once I realized my mistake I set it aside until I could figure out what to do. Also, once I realized I was formatting the wrong drive, I fixed the problem and now have Win 7 running on my desktop computer. Since then I have done a full scan and attempted a data recovery using
"Partition find and mount". That is the reason I know that windows install files are on the disc ~1GB.

According to what you said above, it's looking like I'll need to utilize the skills of a professional if I want to get that information back. Would that be your assessment?

thanks again for your help.

[SAjunky]

You can find out. There are tools which make recovery easier. R-Studio just mentioned above. If you want to try yourself, clone this drive first and experiment on the clone (physical drive or read-only image). If you find task is time consuming or above your capabilities, give job to the lab.