HDD GURU FORUMS

Hi guys

I'm new to the site. Seems like its exactly what I need to save my life!

My wife had a mac image on a removable 1.5tb external drive. It had all her photos from the family over the last 10 years. All the photos were also duplicated and copied to the hard drive in folders.

I plugged it into my PC thinking it was a different external drive. When it didn't register I used the windows fdisk program to delete the partition on it and create a new NTFS partition, hoping to use it to copy some movies for a mate at work.

6gb of mkv's were copied onto the drive before I realised that I had inadvertently deleted her only copy of all of our most treasured memories.

I'm in A LOT of trouble.

I'm more than happy to pay for some software to recover the lost photos but at am a bit of a loss which program will be able to scour the hard drive and pull the jpegs from the mac format partition from under the current NTFS partition.

I realise the 6gb of files I copied onto the hard drive has probably nuked some of the photos, but I'm hoping the vast majority of them are still intact somewhere.

Any suggestions on whether I should attempt to recover the files on my PC, or on her old macbook, and which PC or Mac software I should use?

Thanks a lot for any suggestions.

You can try a good logical recovery tool, such as R-Studio. Having the first 6GB of the disk overwriten might have completely destroyed the filesystem info, that means only a raw recovery might be possible. In this case non-overwriten files contents could be recovered, but filenames and directory structures would be lost. If you are lucky enough and the mac image file was located far from the begining of the disk and was not fragmented when writen, you might be able to restore it completely. You cannot know until you try.

thanks a lot. Will try R-studio!

Use r-studio to make an full image to file of the device to another location. You must do this first before anything else! Then run the recovery software on the image file.

i would recommend image "freespace only", that way you can ignore the overwritten part all together..