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OK before all else I admit my stupidity - I got lazy and now did not backup my system before attempting this.

 

I have accidentally formatted my hard drive which was configured as a triple boot with XP, Fedora Core 5 and OSX. Well I updated my 10.4.1 to 10.4.5 with the patched DVD but somehow the system seemed slower so I deleted the partition for the OSX installation to do a fresh 10.4.5 install. I rebooted and the disk utility only recognised the NTFS and Linux partitions but not the free space I had created and intended to use. When I used the disk utility to format this partition I must have selected the entire disk and neglected the warnings to not do so and now have my XP data hanging in limbo as I am unable to boot back into it. I have not attempted to install data so I know it's still there on the drive.

 

When I run the Core 5 DVD it recognises the disk as a single HFS+ partition and from the XP rescue it says the drive is unreadable. I have tried fixmbr to no avail but am hesitant about diskpart. How can I recover my data from this harddrive? Would I now indeed need a new hard disk at this point? Or can I use the disk utility to revert somehow? Or what do I do?

 

Please help! Many thanks in advance.

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First of all, its good that you did not change anything on that harddisk.

 

Get yourself "Testdisk" and let it search for older partition structures. In most cases I could recover my drives with it.

 

If you have no luck, google for "hirens boot cd 8.1 or 8.0". there are many partition recover programs delivered with.

Wow. I know, if you're lucky, that if you've changed the partition table in a way that you didn't want, have not written any data to the drive, and know exactly the previous partition table parameters, you can reset the table and recover your data. I mean, I've done it (while holding my breath, I'll admit). But once you have reformatted the filesystem? Um, thats a stretch, my friend. I GUESS if HFS+ is dynamic (like XFS, for example), there is some hope that the disk has not been completely overwritten, but I really doubt it. Hey, if you are able to recover ANYTHING, post it. I'm really curious.

 

Good luck!!

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