I Am A Dunderhead! AHHHHHHHH!

Okay... I needed to nuke a hard drive. I tried Darik's Nuke CD but it seemed to hang. I decided just to take out the drive and manually reformat it before loading on a new OS...

I did this at my server station downstairs. I was in a rush and wasn't paying attention. I accidentally did a quick format of my storage drive! (Kicks self in butt for 10th time!) I've never done this before and feel like a stupid rookie.

I know that the files are still there since it was done with the quick format... I think it is the FAT tables that are removed.

Does anyone know of a FREE way to fix this so I get back ALL my data with NO errors? Not looking for speculation here... Only a response of, "Yup... I did this and I did XXXXX and it worked 100%!" I've browsed the Internets and I know there are PAID programs out there.... But you guys are the smartest on the Interwebs... So I was just curious....

I've been insanely busy or out of town lately... This is what hapens when you rush!

Thanks in advance.

Rick

 

pm ..........

 

I know you said "no speculation here" and want something that an experienced user has used and can confirm that it works, but I have been looking for an excuse to try Recuva, made by the CCleaner people. If you don't get any better answer, it is here:

Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File and Disk Recovery - Free Download

The "Features" section of that page says:
"Even if you've formatted a drive so that it looks blank, Recuva can still find your files on it. "

Just to be safe, you might try deliberately quick formatting another drive that doesn't matter, hook it up externally to the computer that has Recuva installed, and see if Recuva works as advertised.

By the way, you probably already know to not install *anything* to the accidentally formatted drive. Remove it and run any recovery software on it with it connected externally.

 

Recuva is very good and free tool. Get Data Back is paid software but also excellent.
Attaching couple drives on a desktop and running DBAN Autonuke without disconnecting the old drives out is also a fine move

I actually pulled a prank on a colleague yesterday. He had already left home and left his laptop on a table. We replace computers and refurb/recycle old ones, colleagues laptop is from one of those lots. I've told him couple of times to mark that one laptop somehow as it is in danger to be mixed with ones meant for wipe. I switched his hard drive with one meant to be wiped and ran DBAN on it.

I can hardly wait his face when he comes back to work friday and opens his laptop next to a pile of others saying "DBAN finished with errors" (it was actually a broken drive, too).

 

Sent PM . . . . .

 

Just use testdisk TestDisk Step By Step - CGSecurity, Maybe from an UBCD Ultimate Boot CD - Download the UBCD This has worked in the similar cases several times for me.

 

Will work on this tomorrow..... I'll keep you all posted.

 

You can try DriveRescue is free, is an old software, but still works somethimes, or at least it worked for me when i formatted a pen drive, that shouldn't be too different fro an hard drive, another one is UndeletePlus.

 

It is rebuilding the drive now... A 1TB storage drive that was 84% full! It's been churning for over 3 hours with almost 2 hours left to go. I have everything crossed!

 

I hope you got a bottle of JD near by...you might need it

 

Way ahead of you Blair!

 

That advice works best!

 

Ah Ahhhhhhhhh

 

*Jaws music*

Waiting for the smoke to clear...

mnem
Smoke... dwagons... Bloody bwilliant. This will end well.

 

"Rebuilding"??? Was this disk in a mirrored RAID?

 

No... Not in a RAID... I have that setup in another desktop... This was just a storage drive.

Well... The Jaws Music is over (LOL) and the program finished. This was a very cool program and it looks like it got just about everything. So if there was a file in there that I would have killed for... I would have gotten it back. BUT...

I'd have to look for it. All my pictures were put into a JPG file with names like File1, file2, etc. The same with my 30,000 MP3s... So I would have to g back in and rename everything! So when I have the time... I'll search through what I need, delete the rest and rebuild from the storage drive in my office desktop unit that has a similar backup on it. I mainly worry about my pictures, music and Toughbook stuff. Over the years I have amassed A LOT of Toughbook stuff.

Anyway... Thanks to everyone for pitching in. I learned that I need to slow down when working with power tools.

 

If u not have done anything else with ur hdd it would be worth to try testdisk, like I wrote above....U will get all ur files, like it was before on this drive.

 

If your mp3 files were also id tagged they can be quite easily renamed back into proper form, most renaming programs can do that

Edit: I just realised that photos might have EXIF data too, that may provide filename and time information.

Unfortunately neither of those restore folder structure.

 

When I format I always always disconnect all other drives. Trust me, its happened before. BTW, try crash plan its worth the cost.

 

Yes, i had the same surprise soe time ago and it's a bit frustrating searching for a file in a pit of some xxx.xxx files, on the other hand, photos taken from camera should have INFO written inside, that should report shutter timings, aperture, heigt a width in pixels, gps geotagging if present, sequntial photo number, if the photo was taken in portrait or landscape mode, and last but not least date and time.

So you can read data and rename your pics. Another simply way to cut down the number of images to see is to look at their dimensions in byte, your camera has a fixed resolution so images would be approx all the same dimensions less or more, so if you take all images between 5mb and 7mb that should be from your camera, (this is for my camera a nikon P90).

 

Yes... I can rename them. I have the software to do that as well as add comments and album artwork... But 27,000 of them? It's easier for me to copy all of my old files over from another drive. I have already restored the MP3s... Working on the pictures now... I needed to go through them anyway. Dupes, out of focus shots, etc.