BlueBoy

So I plugged in my external drive, and backed up all my files before my usual reformat to clean my internal drive.
Well, i noticed my external was still accidentally plugged in when i got to the "which drive do you want to reformat" screen. So i unplugged the external, and manually rebooted the computer via the reset button on the front of the case.
It rebooted, and i went through the normal reformat process wiping only the internal drive clean.
Once i got windows reinstalled, I plugged in my external to start loading up all my things and the drive is empty. It says "the drive is not formatted, would you like to format it now?"
I know for sure I didnt reformat the external, is all my information gone?
I took it to a friends, same problem.
I tried diagnostics, no luck.

What can i do?
Thanks in advance.

ZionEx

Well, the situation isn't good. You can perhaps remove the drive from the enclosure and try to connect it in a system as a slave. This will of course void any warranty you may have. That would be the first step in my opinion though.

BlueBoy

Thanks for the reply, I definitely dont want to take it apart and void a warranty.
I tried two software recover programs with no luck.
Anything else?

JerseyDubbin

doesn't seem like you have much of a choice right now...nothing comes up when you choose not to format?

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Modki

It's happened to all of us once. This is exactly why incremental backups to an external backup that's kept off-site is good. I use a 1TB online storage because there is no way of accidentally deleting anything.

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mrkryz

Well your not hosed quite yet... Im guessing what you did was wipe your FAT/MBR info from the external.

1) DONT do anything to the drive at all.. zero.


You'll basically need to re-create the old file allocation tables / partition tables etc. If you know linux well enough I could probably walk you through it using fdisk and your recollection of the externals partition size/sectors/cylinders. But I think you may want to consider something like:

http://pcwin.com/Utilities/FAT_Parti...ware/index.htm
http://www.softsland.com/mbr.html

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dankoni

Taking it apart is the only thing you can do. However, I don't have much hope that will work. If it wasn't seeing the drive at all, then maybe. The fact that it sees the drive as not formatted is not good.

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