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Re-formatting a HDD by accident in HFS


jeanpave
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Hi.

 

I made one of the dumbest moves of all time.

I wanted to try Mac OS X 10.4.8 on a PC running XP Professional, and I used the 'Disk Utility' feature to format the hard-drive on which XP was installed, accidentally, rather than the empty hard-drive which I wanted to use for OS X.

 

I immediately rebooted when I discovered the mistake, but I think the XP Pro installation is gone, right?

 

Can anybody think of any possible way that could help me recover it?

 

Thanks.

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Hi.

 

I made one of the dumbest moves of all time.

I wanted to try Mac OS X 10.4.8 on a PC running XP Professional, and I used the 'Disk Utility' feature to format the hard-drive on which XP was installed, accidentally, rather than the empty hard-drive which I wanted to use for OS X.

 

I immediately rebooted when I discovered the mistake, but I think the XP Pro installation is gone, right?

 

Can anybody think of any possible way that could help me recover it?

 

Thanks.

 

Hello!

 

If you didnt "Secure Format" the Disk, or overwrite it a few Times there is still a pretty good chance to get your files.

Important: You need a PC (running Windows XP would be great, i guess the Software work under Vista and 7 too).

 

Then connect the Hard Drive you want to Recover the files from to your Windows PC.

 

If you had NTFS as file system you should try R-Studio NTFS for FAT R-Studio FAT.

The best Software in your case would be Easy Recovery Pro. It takes pretty long to scan the whole Drive but there is a pretty good chance to recover the stuff you deleted.

 

One more important detail: recover the files to another hard drive, never recover it to the drive you recover from.

 

I made pretty good experience with the mentioned software. Those tools worked for me in 9 of 10 cases.

 

Good Luck

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Thank you, Lazybon3.

 

However, my question was whether I can get back the partition table of that Windows installation so that XP might function again.

I already knew how to get the files back. Sorry for not making that clear.

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Yeah but:

 

If you got back the files on a new NTFS Partition on another Drive then you are half the way.

 

From there on you just got to put in your Windows CD, boot up in Recovery Mode, it will search your Hard Drives for Windows Setups.

 

If it finds your Recovery Drive as Windows Partition:

 

- type in "fixboot" and "fixmbr"

 

Then you should have a bootable partition with all your old data, that you can just clone back onto your internal hard drive.

Maybe there are other ways too, but thats the way with minimal data loss.

 

Hope that was at least a little what you were looking for.

 

Good Luck.

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