Hard Drive D:

I was burning a dvd, and before the process began, I went to format the disc. I right clicked what I thought was the cd drive, but to no one's fault but my own, I accidently clicked my D drive...My comp is the hp dv9500t with dual hard drives. The D drive, or my second hard drive, was where all my media was stored. Because I formatted it, all the information was deleted. I tried to run the system restore, but no luck, an error message appears when I restart my computer; something along the lines of 'system restore could not complete no changes have been made'. Is there any way I could reverse the process of me formatting the drive?

 

Your only options would be to buy Acronis Disk Director, it's not a free program. I bought the program and it works quite good. I once accidentally deleted one of my partition and using Acronis Disk Director, I got all my files back. Just make sure you don't write any files to the partition!

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/

 

A quick thing to add before you do anything: The more you use your computer the better the chance data will be overwritten. Use your computer as little as possible, and that will give you a better chance of recovering more data. Depending how important the drive is, if the acronis doesn't work there are many places that have forensic tools that can recover deleted data. I work for a forensic company and do quite a bit of data recovery and data carving from unallocated space. Your best bet for the time being until you know exactly what you are going to do is to shutdown your laptop and take out the other drive to avoid the possibility of data being overwritten.

 

Thaoster, the situation he is in is different from when you just deleted your partition. He actually reformatted the partition, at least that's what I understood from reading his post.

After testing the acronis program, I found that it won't help you recover data after you format a partition. Do you have an idea on how many files were on the drive? Most likely you are going to have to go somewhere to get the data recovered, or send it out somewhere. I myself would be able to get your data no problem, but I don't know how important the data was to you and how much you would want to spend on recovering it. The big problem is, because you reformatted the drive the MFT (Master File Table) which contains the filenames and location of where they are located on the HDD is gone and a new one was put in its place. The only way you can get the data off of the HDD is to carve it out, which is a manual process and you need specific tools for it.

 

I did the exact same thing and reinstalled an os on my old drive and was able to recover all my files with this program.
http://www.stellarinfo.com/