It souhds from this description, that redefining the volume that
formerly had NTFS on it, will overwrite the master file table (MFT).
But maybe everything after that small section, would be untouched.
I doubt I can find a complete enough spec to say for sure, but
this hints that all is not lost.
http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs-mft.htm
Before doing anything else, you need some place to put the recovered
data, assuming you are going to buy one of the many tools invented
for such catastrophies. I would recommend the purchase or acquisition
of one or more disks for the purpose. If the data is valuable, it is
valuable enough to buy a couple of disks. The disks can be used
later, to make the backups you should have been making.
I've learned my lesson about recovery software before. I used a tool
once, which caused more damage than it fixed. So the _first_ thing you
do, is a sector by sector copy of the damaged disk onto another physical
device. This could either be an exact copy (in which case, a
recovery tool can be run against the exact copy), or it could be
some kind of compressed image of the volume (suitable for restoring
to the original disk, multiple times if necessary). Then,
if one of these "wonder-tools" doesn't work, you are not
completely sunk.
Here is a sample tool. You can run this against the damaged disk,
or the exact backup image, but not both. Always keep at least one
image in pristine condition, so you can start over again with the
recovery effort.
So the first tool you need, is something to copy the disk to a
second disk. (If the recovery tool wants to write the recovered
data somewhere, yet another disk can be used for that. Some
tools work that way, as they really should not be writing to
the bad disk, as part of their recovery process.)
The second tool you need, would be one like this.
http://www.diskinternals.com/ntfs-recovery/
The above link is not a recommendation - I've never had to recover
a PC file system, so have not been faced with this.
You can try as many of these recovery tools, as you have time
to copy back the backup image, onto the original disk. Whether
refreshing the disk each time, between attempts, really depends
on whether the recovery tool tries to write the disk or not.
Using your favorite search engine, you can search on
reformatted ntfs recovery
and see what other tools are for sale.
Good luck,
Paul
