Help! Need to recover NTFS partition!

[ElectroBlaster]

I feel like a right plonker at the moment! I accidently managed to wipe the wrong ntfs partition by creating a fat32 one. Its all to do with an external seagate drive im trying to sort out. The seagate has been hooked up to a bt home hub and needed to be fat32 so I used a tool to wipe it. Had some problems with it corrupting files so proceeded to fix it and then stupidly wiped the wrong drive

And thats after already sussing out the correct stuff! Talk about massive fail lol.

Anyway is there anything I can do? or am i shafted?

The tool I used is called "FAT32Format.exe" or "Guiformat" it basically allows large disks to be formatted as fat32 so PS3's and other things can see it and has been working for a few days no problems. I stupidly ran it and just went and re-did the partition without looking close enougth.

 

[wonko]

Hi, that's tough. I don't know what the tool you used does to a disk, so you might not be able to completely reverse the damage, but I'd expect there to be a fair chance of recovering files from the disk. TestDisk (linux and free) and GetDataBack (commercial) would be worth a look. If the data is important I'd suggest cloning the drive and working on the copy so you couldn't make it any worse. Good luck with it.

 

[skyripper]

First off, dont do any operations which will write to the drive you are trying to recover.

If you can, image (Acronis or Partition Wizard) the drive to a spare one - not a different partition on the same drive.

Grab a tool called GetDataBack from runtime.org. There's a demo version. Let that take a look at your drive and see what it can find. If its looks good, tell your friend to get his credit card out.

I've no connection with this company other than their Raid recovery tool got me back 2TB worth of data when my Raid5 failed. it took a long time, but it worked.

EDIT: I should have read wonko's post above.