Hi friends, I'm glad I found this place, as I'm at my wits end here...


I've had this Seagate external HDD for 3-4 years and I had a ton of old projects on it. Anyways, I dl'd a program for my buddy on my PC which is running XP SP3. I put this program on my the aforementioned external HDD which was running NTFS file system. I took my external to my friends house and connected it via USB to his mac, which of course runs FAT32. I was prompted by his mac to re-format the external I connected, and I immeadiately hit cancel and disconnected it.
So I take it home and connect it back to my regular PC, but WTF, my PC doesn't recognize the file system, it says the drive is completely blank. I was baffled, so I got a diagnostic program from runtime.org (getdataback) and ran a diagnostic. Apparently my friend's mac created a FAT32 partition on top of the original NTFS or somehow split the drive into two partitions. I haven't initiated any data recovery yet, I'm afraid if I do something wrong I will corrupt any chance of getting my data back...

Bottom line: I obviously want to get my data back, and in the NTFS file system. Is this possible???

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

U have a good chance to recover everything. Runtime's soft is good, but u will need a spare drive to copy the data to (and of course to buy the licence to the prog, don't forget to use the NTFS version )
It can be useful to delete the newly created partitions from the drive, so that XP would not write anything to the user space.
This is not harmful, GDB will detect the file system without it (hopefully).
If u are familiar with disk structures, u might restore the lost partition on its place with minor damages, but this is for 'experts' only .

pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

Hey thanks for the reply pepe. I have one other concern though. I loaded up GDB and it recognized the external drive (the one I'm trying to recover) as having a FAT32 file system. I am worried because all of my old files were in the NTFS system, and the GDB program asks what file system the drive I wish to recover is in. Bottom line, should I recover the files using GDB's FAT32 version since that's what it sees my drive as, or should I recover them using the NTFS version of GDB?

First thing I would do is take an image of your drive & play around with that.

Don't use the messed up drive any more than you need to.

You'll need the NTFS version since your drive was initially in that format.

Best regards,

Dobre

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Murphy was an optimist

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Even if my recovery program recognizes the drive as FAT32?

Since it was originally formatted as NTFS, U have to treat it that way.
I stated it in my first post drawing your attention to it.
Forget that FAT32.

Or U may try and fail, if u don't believe

pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery