I'm wondering if it still be possible to recover files from a hard drive that was partially reformatted by accident.

I had been setting up a bootable flash drive in Windows 7 beta 700, and was running line commands for diskpart. I'd experimented with the process several times. But on one attempt I noticed the system was taking a lot of time, and exited the DOS window.

I didn't notice any problem until I rebooted the system. I had Windows XP and Windows 7 set up to dual boot. When I attemped to boot WinXP, I got an error message that the OS was missing. Somehow I'd set the wrong drive for diskpart to format.

I booted back into Win7, and (I know you're not supposed to do this...but) I checked the drive in Windows Explorer. When clicking on the drive where WinXP was installed, I got a popup saying the drive wasn't formatted. So I'm guessing the drive was damaged so extensively that even viewing it that way probably didn't add any further damage. Am I wrong there?

Assuming I probably couldn't do any more damage, and accepting I'd probaly not get the data back, I ran 3 recovery programs on the drive in Win7:

* Stellar Phoenix Recovery Suite v2.1
* Acronis True Image v11
* GetDataBack v3.66.

None of them were able to find more than perhaps 1% of the data, if that. I opened the drive in Winhex and found that all bits had been zeroed from the begining of the drive to about 50% of the way into the drive. So the MBR and partition tables at the beginning of the drive are gone.

The drive was roughly formatted like this:

----------------------
Maxtor 300GB SATA HDD:
----------------------

1st partition:
Partition type: Primary
Size: 0-200GB
Used for: Data

2nd partition:
Partition type: Primary
Size: 100GB
Used for: OS/Windows XP

--------------------

I read somewhere that there should be backup partition tables that the end of each partition. From what I can see in Winhex, there is still a lot of data at the end of the 1st partition. And the 2nd partition where Windows XP was installed looks like it was untouched.

What I'd first like to ask is whether or not there is any chance of recovering data from either of those partitions at this point? The data I'd like to recover is basically a lot of music and video files I was archiving there. It's not crucial data I can't do without. But it was years of archived material I'll have to go back and recreate.

Thanks for any feedback.
TS

Clone this drive and stop trying to recover from this drive
Do not work with a damaged drive to preform recovery on

Then from the clone you can use recovery program to work from there to see if you can get your data back

one you find what you are looking for do not write again to this drive write to another drive all together

There are some good programs out there that can rebuild your partition tables and get your data back if you did not do a low level format on this drive it still might be possible to find what you are looking for

_________________
Iorana Haraharaini

YYou may not be able to get data from 0 filled area but if you see some area with data after 50% line, you might get some files back!!!

Thanks for your input here.


The drive has been disconnected for a while now. Is it possible to do recovery on the drive itself? Or are you saying that it's absolutely necessary to make an image and copy an ISO one big file to another drive? I'll have to get another drive to store the image then.

Or are you suggesting to image the drive right over to another so I end up with 2 drives with identical data?

Any software suggestions? I thought the 3 I tried were pretty good, but this isn't my expertise.

I'm not sure what a 'low level' format is. But I said, is was a diskpart command line entry. Something like: DISKPART> format f:

Clone or copy exact data onto another hard drive that is the same or bigger in size. (1 big image file or you can chop them up, but please make a copy of your damaged drive) More than likely you will need another drive for the clone or imaging process. (2 drives with identical data!!!)

Format F: more than likely 0 filled some portion of your hard drive as you stated. However, if you are seeing RAW data beyond 50% of your drive capacity, your data beyond that point may be available for recovery via manual recovery process, if the software weren't able to do so.

This is what I'd like to determine before I drop a bunch o$ $$ on another drive.

If I can connect the damaged drive to the system and boot from a flash drive running an OS that won't write to the HDD, I could examine it with a hex editor to determine if it's salvageable.

But I'd need someone who could walk me through the process, or suggest an alternative.

I have also run TestDisk on the drive following these instructions on the http://www.cgsecurity.org wesbite, and again only found a tiny amount of data that could be recovered.

Each time you play with this drive the less chance can be to recover it

It is absolutely important to not work with a damaged drive you will need to make a clone or copy of this drive to another drive it is important to do this

after your clone of the drive you can do what you want - there are software programs out there to help you in recovery

If the first 50% of the drive is 0 filled it will be impossible to recover data off this part of the drive

It depends on how much of the drive has data left on it and how full this part of your drive is to find the rest of your files. If you drive is like example 120G and you have formated or zero filled 60G then you have 60G left but if you only had an original of 80G on the drive you might have a chance to get back 20G of data

If you continue to run software programs on this drive your chances become less

What else do you want us to say it is important to make a copy of the drive it is your choice what you want to do with it and if you are going to invest in another drive to make this copy with.

_________________
Iorana Haraharaini

My apologies for leaving this issue open. It seemed the only way I was going to be able to recover the data was going mean buying a new 300GB or greater hard drive to image the corrupted drive to. And that was pretty disheartening, as I really can't afford much of anything these days. I pretty much put the project on the back burner and have just left the drive disconnected in the system box.

Unfortunately I've managed to corrupt another drive by running DISKPART CLEAN on the wrong disk number. This time I immediately shut the system down and pulled the drive's cable. And luckily I've found a post by SkEyeDiver in this forum http://forum.hddguru.com/lost-configuration-info-t11802.html?hilit=diskpart%20clean#p76940 who had the exact same problem, and managed to recover his MBR and partition tables with the utility called TestDisk that pepe suggested.

I'll post a question in that thread to see if anyone has any further information that might help me recover my drive

Thx
TS