[cghoenes]

Hello,

I am in need of some major help. I am in the process of upgrading my computer that I built six years ago by adding a new motherboard, processor, memory and hard drive. I installed a 250 G hard drive and partitioned the first 30 G for the operating system and programs and plan on using the remaining 220 G to store data. These drives were set up as NTFS.

I set up my old 40 G hard drive as a data drive, but could not find it in windows explorer. I installed partition magic and saw the old drive listed as a FAT32 drive. I labeled the old drive “G” and asked partition magic to turn it into a NTFS drive so my computer could see it. After the process was complete, I went into windows explorer and found the new G Drive, but it was wiped clean!

I know that there are programs that can recover files or “undelete”. What would be the best way to get my old hard drive back to the way it was? After I recover the files (hopefully), what is the best way to make it available as a storage drive on my new system?

I would greatly appreciate any feedback you could give me.

Chris Hoenes

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There is a good program out there called StellarPhoenix. It will cost you about $150 to buy it, but they do offer a free trial you can download that will tell you what files youcan get back.

I had a customer in my shop who had a raid array that got wiped out and I was able to recover a 180 Gb partition in whole for them. It was not bootable anymore, but I was able to get the data

[tschrock]

There is a good program out there called StellarPhoenix. It will cost you about $150 to buy it, but they do offer a free trial you can download that will tell you what files youcan get back.

I had a customer in my shop who had a raid array that got wiped out and I was able to recover a 180 Gb partition in whole for them. It was not bootable anymore, but I was able to get the data

[warriorscot]

Converting a drive to another format is called a reformat of the drive if you do it all data in that drive is wiped. Unfortunatley its very difficult and expensive to recover data after a drive has been reformated, im afraid more than likely your data is gone for good unless you have a backup of it somewhere else.

[acklan]

According to this article you cannot revert back to FAT. I suspect that Partition Magic formatted rather than converted your files.

This article explains how to convert a FAT partition to a NTFS partition without loosing data.

http://www.microsoft...convertfat.mspx