Accidentally Formatted HDD

[sztraka1234]

Hi,

last night i used a program (HP USB disk format tool) to format my USB stick & make it bootable.
When i first launched the program my 500gb WD USB HDD was automatically selected in the drop down menu,
so i changed it to my 4gb USB stick which i wanted to format.
I selected Quick Format & it came up with some error (I cannot remember the exact error) "Cannot complete operation"

And now whenever i click on my 500gb WD HDD in My Computer it asks me if i want to format it.
The drive was formatted as a exFAT.
Is there any tool that will restore the Partition on the disk ?

Thanks.

[sztraka1234]

UPDATE:

I came across a free tool called TestDisk & managed to restore my partition.
All is good now.

[tonyc]

You are extremely lucky.

If you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7 and had NOT selected the quick format, your data would be gone.

Beginning in Windows Vista the format utility WIPES a drive when the full (NOT Quick) format is used.

See: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941961

TonyC