[honeydo]

I accidentally formatted a full 150 GB external drive to NTFS file system and have lost everything. Is there a way to retreive the data?

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Welcome to Geeks2Go!

There is software that can retrieve data from a deleted or re-formatted partition, but is not guaranteed to be 100% successful in all cases.

http://www.partition-recovery.com/
http://www.ptdd.com/...edpartition.htm

You can find many more by using a search engine and spending a little time sifting through the results.
Just type partition recovery in the search bar of Google.
Most of them have a "cut down" free trial version which just verifies that the software can find your files.
Then you have to pay for a key to unlock it to get any further. Or the trial might be one where
you can only retrieve files up to a certain size.

Edited by pip22, 23 April 2008 - 11:35 PM.

[pip22]

Welcome to Geeks2Go!

There is software that can retrieve data from a deleted or re-formatted partition, but is not guaranteed to be 100% successful in all cases.

http://www.partition-recovery.com/
http://www.ptdd.com/...edpartition.htm

You can find many more by using a search engine and spending a little time sifting through the results.
Just type partition recovery in the search bar of Google.
Most of them have a "cut down" free trial version which just verifies that the software can find your files.
Then you have to pay for a key to unlock it to get any further. Or the trial might be one where
you can only retrieve files up to a certain size.

Edited by pip22, 23 April 2008 - 11:35 PM.

[Buji]

Another way I found to work with the same effect, again not guaranteed is without software. What you do is open a folder (any folder), at the top left click on "organize" in that menu click on "folder and search options", then in the folder options window click the "view" tab. Then uncheck the box that says "Hide protected operating system files" and you also WANT to show hidden files and folders. Then when you go to your My Computer window and open that Drive, you should see new folders called $RECYCLE.BIN and RECYCLE. All information that was not zeroed when you reformatted that drive would be in these folders. Just make sure after you are done, you hide your protected operating system files again. - Buji

[==SpuD==]

Another Program you could try is Recuva

Recuva!

SpuD