Marked for deletion

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Guest

Hi All,
I am in a emergency mode need some help to save myself for major disaster.
I has to reformat my c drive so I copied everything to my external firewire
drive called J.
When I inserted my xp cd I wanted to format the c:drive but accidentaly I
marked j(exterbal drive) and hit the l button to delete all data. but before
I hit the enter I realize and hit F3 to quit. It did not even start formating
I just marked for deleting but again I quit at confirmation.
Now I cannot see my J drive.(I did not format the computer) When I realize
the mistake I just wanted to go back and check the j drive and I cannot see J
drive. Please help
I need the data on J drive badly

Thanks
 
Andy said:
Hi All,
I am in a emergency mode need some help to save myself for major disaster.
I has to reformat my c drive so I copied everything to my external firewire
drive called J.
When I inserted my xp cd I wanted to format the c:drive but accidentaly I
marked j(exterbal drive) and hit the l button to delete all data. but before
I hit the enter I realize and hit F3 to quit. It did not even start formating
I just marked for deleting but again I quit at confirmation.
Now I cannot see my J drive.(I did not format the computer) When I realize
the mistake I just wanted to go back and check the j drive and I cannot see J
drive. Please help
I need the data on J drive badly

Thanks
Click to expand...

Did you try unplugging the external device, then plug it back in to see if it detects it? If it does detect it, then give then "J" (or whatever) drive letter again.
 
By the way J drive has lot more data then I just backed up. and thats the
reason I need j drive
 
Thanks Tom,

I did. Tha bad news is it shows the entire drive space as unallocated space
in disk management.
Beleive me I did not format the drive. Any further help would be greatly
appreciated.

Thanks
Andy
 
You may be screwed now, short of buying very expensive recovery software. One thing you can try, if you have time to download it, is Knoppix, which can be burned and run as an operating system from the CD disk itself. It can read NTFS, and you may be able to copy the files from there to your PC, then format the drive again in Windows through Disk Management, and then copy back the files.
 
Thanks Tom.
I will try Knoppix.

Tom said:
You may be screwed now, short of buying very expensive recovery software. One thing you can try, if you have time to download it, is Knoppix, which can be burned and run as an operating system from the CD disk itself. It can read NTFS, and you may be able to copy the files from there to your PC, then format the drive again in Windows through Disk Management, and then copy back the files.
Click to expand...
 
Do a Google search for "file recovery programs" and you make the choice. Like I said, Knoppix can do exactly what you need, and it is free to use. But the download is huge, like over 700mgs. You burn it as an image to a CD-R(W), and it run just like an OS from the CD-ROM drive. it is a nice system too, I use it fairly often myself.

But honestly, I am not familiar with file recovery programs, as I back up all of my data to DVD dbl layered disks, where they don't (cannot) get deleted at all.
 
I downloaded the knoppix and installed on a cd. I am not very savy when ot
comes to linux. I could not even see my firewire drive from Linux. I can see
other devices like cd & dvd and my c drive but not my external drive.
Any other tip with knoppix ? I guess I am not sure what to do when I boot
with the cd.

Thanks
 
OK, I am using now Knoppix to make this post, and I can see my device.
When you boot into Knoppix, it should show as another hard disk device
on the desktop. If not, Click on "K" Control Center, Peripherals, and
expand thatr to see if it is listed there. If it isn't, then it isn't
supported.
 
Andy said:
Hi All,
I am in a emergency mode need some help to save myself for major
disaster.
I has to reformat my c drive so I copied everything to my external
firewire
drive called J.
When I inserted my xp cd I wanted to format the c:drive but
accidentaly I
marked j(exterbal drive) and hit the l button to delete all data. but
before
I hit the enter I realize and hit F3 to quit. It did not even start
formating
I just marked for deleting but again I quit at confirmation.
Now I cannot see my J drive.(I did not format the computer) When I
realize
the mistake I just wanted to go back and check the j drive and I
cannot see J
drive. Please help
I need the data on J drive badly
Click to expand...

My guess is that the partition entry in the partition table got deleted.
The formatting never started but the partition doesn't exist anymore.
If you run FDISK (from a bootable floppy) or Disk Management
(diskmgmt.msc) in Windows XP, does it show any partitions on that drive?

You could try to simply create a new partition which is the same size as
what you had before and starts at the same sector offset. If you had
one partition that encompassed the entire size of the drive then that is
not so hard to figure out as you create a partition that also
encompasses the entire drive.

The problem comes in that creating a partition that encompasses the same
sectors as the old partition there still is no entry within the
partition table entry itself to say what type of partition it is. If it
was NTFS, you need to edit the partition table entry to note that it is
an NTFS partition type. I use the partition table editor that is
included with Partition Magic. You can also download it from their FTP
site at:

ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/tools/pq/utilities/

I think it is in the ptedit.zip file (the ptedit32.zip file is probably
only for use when ran under Windows). You might also be able to use the
DISKPART utility provided with Windows XP by using its SELECT and CREATE
commands to create a partition table entry.

You'll need to know what are the values to enter into the partition
table entry for each partition type. I usually Google for a partition
type list, like the one found at
http://www.bitzenbytes.com/Content-Arcanum-18-1-58.html. Just to be
sure 07 for HPFS/NTFS was the correct value from that list, I used
DISKPART to check:

DISKPART
list disk
select disk 0 (in my case, there is only one disk)
list partition
select partition 2 (this is my NTFS-formatted Windows XP partition;
the first one is FAT32 for Windows ME)
detail partition

From the output of the last command to show the details of the
NTFS-formatted primary partition where Windows XP is installed:

Partition 2
Type : 07
Hidden: No
Active: Yes

So, yes, 07 is the correct value to put into the partition table entry
for an NTFS partition type. If the partition table entry has been
deleted but the partition itself was never touched then you can recreate
the partition table entry (by using FDISK, for example) that matches the
same sectors that the partition used before. However, that only defines
the new partition to encompass the same portion of the disk that the old
partition occupied. It doesn't define the *type* of the partition and
that's where a partition table editor is needed. Obviously all of this
is performing surgery at a very low and critical level in the storage
subsytem so you do this at your own risk. You may want to use a drive
imaging program that saves PHYSICAL image filesets (it reads by sectors
rather than by logical reads through the file system).

Obviously a utility that looks at the contents of a partition to guess
at its file type (and even detect where are the partitions) would make
it easier but it may not guess correctly, but then neither might you.
You could trial the demo version of Active@
(http://www.partition-recovery.com/) to see if it will work but it
probably won't actually complete the partition undelete since, after
all, they want you to buy it ($30). Be aware that Knoppix runs Linux so
you'll have to become familiar with a Unix environment and Unix
commands.
 
Pull the drive out of the external case and hook to an IDE cable to make it easier to find the
files. It can then be returned to the case after you get the stuff off.
 
This is a firewire maxtor external drive. Will this works with IDE ?
I guess if this works then this is the most easiest solution.
Let me know and I will give it a try.
I want to thank Tom & Vangurad
Tom, I tried knoppix but it did not recognized.
I will try David's idea and then Van's
Any other ideas are welcome
Thanks Again.
 
I guess that could work, but be careful that is doesn't screw the drive up, by handling it improperly. If you can do that, then instal, it (temporarily) as a second internal drive (you can leave the case open while doing all of this). You then could use a disk utility to copy the files from the drive to another drive. but, if it doesn't recognize a file format e.g. NTFS (which would mean that you deleted its existance, and by basic reason removed everything on it too), I'd say your're out of luck, other than getting a good file recovery program.
 
This is a firewire maxtor external drive. Will this works with IDE ?
I guess if this works then this is the most easiest solution.
Let me know and I will give it a try.
I want to thank Tom & Vangurad
Tom, I tried knoppix but it did not recognized.
I will try David's idea and then Van's
Any other ideas are welcome
Thanks Again.
Click to expand...

You may just need to fix the partition on this drive...which may be
relatively easy.

HOWEVER...

I think this whole process is beyond your scope of capability. If you
screw around with it...and you don't know what yer doin'...you really
COULD lose all your data!! Right now, a simple program like R-Studio
might bring it back.

If the data IS very important to you, I'd suggest taking it to someone
who has more knowledge than you do.

Good luck...


Have a nice one...

Trent

Budweiser: Helping ugly people have sex since 1876!
 
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