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286
 
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About nine months ago I accidentally let windows format the wrong drive during installation. For those of you who know me and are curious as to how I could be so stupid, the next paragraph will explain, otherwise skip past.
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Its been quite a while so this is about as clearly as I can recall.
My two pre-ordered samsung spinpoint 1Tb drives had just arrived (at £110, which at the time seemed pretty good but its pretty galling to see them going for £67 on the back cover of this weeks issue). I formatted a drive from within windows, allowing about 150gb for a my intended new windows partition. I then unplugged all but that one new drive and attempted to install windows upon that partition, the installer didnt see it. If I recall correctly, I then did a bit of googling and found out windows doesnt like installing on partitions greater than 120Gb (but maybe I'm imagining that). I think I then decided to plug all the drives back in and then let the windows installer create its own partition at whatever maximum size it required. I then had 5 hard-drives plugged in, only three of which showed up during windows installation, none of them were displaying as being of a size of a drive I recognised and eventually after a while of punching away on a calculator converting bytes into something meaningful, I got really fed up and took a guess. I failed.
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I left the drive alone and haven't used it for anything since, in the hopes of one day being able to recover the data. So I was pleased this week to see in this weeks issue (issue 1024) that Jason was advising someone else on what to do in pretty much the same situation.
First of all I tried Recuva as suggested, but I'll get back to that in a bit.
SoftPerfect File Recovery simply failed to do a single thing after I'd selected ANY drive and hit "recover."
Glary Undelete didn't want anything to do with the problem hard-drive but managed to pull a few things off of my other-drives. I suspect this tool is more suited to incidents where you've manually deleted a file and emptied the recycle bin then immediately thought "whoops."
Recuva came the closest to being useful. It identified about 35,500 files on the drive. A decent number of those are identified as "fully recoverable - no overwritten clusters detected." However once "recovered" to a different drive I find that .mp3's are unplayable, and .avi's play as random .vob's from dvd backups or other such random video files. Of the dozen or so files I recovered and tested, nothing opens/ plays as expected.
Anyone experienced the same problem with Recuva and figured out the problem? Anyone formatted over their drive and have any other programs to reccomend?
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Gaming machine [XP]: 2.3GHz Q6600, 4CoreDual-SATA2, Crucial 5300 2GB ram, X1950 Pro AGP, Two Diamond 10 Maxtor 300gb SATA, Antec nine hundred, Scythe Infiniti, Hiper 435W Tru Power.
Family pc[XP]:1800+ Athlon XP, Asus A7A266-E, Two 256mb pc2100, FX5200 256mbAGP, 120gb IDE
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386
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Last Login: Today @ 00:55:56
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| A few years ago i had a sales manager at work who decided he would set up a dual boot on his laptop, W2K & XP (dodgy beta pirate version I might add) and managed to wipe the drive during install. We were using this http://www.stellarinfo.com/disk-recovery.htm at the time at it managed a half decent job. We recovered about 70% of his data, which was fully usuable. The rest was either missing or corrupt, as you have discovered in your attempts. The main problem is that some of the data will have been overwritten during the install. This probably isn't any better than the free one you have tried though. I'm sure there is some (very expensive) software available, such as the type used in forensic work, but it all depends on how valuable your data is. There probably is something out there that might help (I'm sure I remember seeing a custom Linux distro for this) and perhaps CaptainCad will know of something. If you have a spare drive, a sector to sector copy of the whole disk may help backup the data before you mess with the original Good luck
Cheers Chris 
Rig 1 Aerocool M40 Corsair HX520,4CORE1333FULLHD E4500,2GB Corsair DDR2,2 X 80 sata (RAID 0)1 200gb , xfx 7900gs xxx
Rig 2 Winfast 6100k8ma,AMD 64 X2 4200 S939 @2.42Ghz 1GB pc3200 (2x512mb) 500gb SATA
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286
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 2 days ago @ 20:21:27
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"It all depends on how valuable your data is." Fortunately, the data isn't particularly valuable to me. I'd pay someone £60 for a guaranteed full recovery but its not worth taking a $99 punt with some paid-for software.
I've done a quick bit of googling, theres a lot of recovery distro's out there but I havent yet found one designed to do what I need. I'll keep looking though and maybe contact Captain CAD. Thanks for the advice.
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Gaming machine [XP]: 2.3GHz Q6600, 4CoreDual-SATA2, Crucial 5300 2GB ram, X1950 Pro AGP, Two Diamond 10 Maxtor 300gb SATA, Antec nine hundred, Scythe Infiniti, Hiper 435W Tru Power.
Family pc[XP]:1800+ Athlon XP, Asus A7A266-E, Two 256mb pc2100, FX5200 256mbAGP, 120gb IDE
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386
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: Today @ 00:55:56
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No problem.
The only reason I quoted that particular software was that it was able to recover data from a lost partition as well as deleted files
Cheers Chris
Rig 1 Aerocool M40 Corsair HX520,4CORE1333FULLHD E4500,2GB Corsair DDR2,2 X 80 sata (RAID 0)1 200gb , xfx 7900gs xxx
Rig 2 Winfast 6100k8ma,AMD 64 X2 4200 S939 @2.42Ghz 1GB pc3200 (2x512mb) 500gb SATA
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