I have a 3.5 gig hard drive partiioned into c and d drives. I accidentally formatted my d drive so when I type dir in D: it tells me 0 bytes. However, i have not saved anything to d drive and think all my files are intact.
How can I get my directory and files back?
Thanks for any responses, pointers.
sisir

Howdy, You don't get them back. You could send the drive away to a place that does do disk recovery but it is very expensive. Anyways, when you format any or all of a hard drive you kill all the information on it. So learn from this mistake and backup what is important next time.

Laters,

Kevin The Tech Dude.

Kevin:
I am sorry if I did not substantiate enough. I suspect that when I formatted the drive, it only deleted the File Allocation Table. I say this because when I run a non-write demo version of a program MBR, it shows me all the files.
I did call the company that makes the MBR program. They said my problem could be fixed with the actual version but it would cost me $200. That seemed a bit too much to spend just to get the directory structure back.
May be there is some cheaper program that would do the job?

you can try using the unformat command, if your version of OS supports. Type help unformat at the dos prompt to get the structure.

$200 IS cheap for a data recovery package, where did you find this program?

For small files, or files that were stored contiguously, you can search for the magic numbers using a hex editor, mark the data you want, then extract that to another disk.

Search under keywords "hex editor" and "magic numbers".

Arnim

Check out datarescue.com and do it yourself.

Its easier than you think, especially if you have access to Norton's DiskEdit - it is considerably cheaper than $200.

Regards

Regards

please send me recovery unformat utility

if anyone has a utility to recover files from a formatted Win98 (FE) please let me know, or better yet send me a copy. I originally had the system files on the drive with some other files stored, and prematurely redid (the same) partition and reformatted. Have not yet written anything else to drive. Thanks.

Please help I have just added a new second hard drive, partition it and install o/s. o/s found some problems on my first original drive and fix. I made an undo disket. midway I cancell, now I can not access my original drive. partition on the original drive is still there but can not access the drive, how can I retrevie the data from my original drive?

thanks for your help.

You can always use the undocumented format /u C: after it was formated the first time.. I just tried this on a Win NT box that had it's C: drive formated, rebooted - was completely dead.. ran format /u C: , rebooted - OS booted back up, no probs...

Don't listen to the bone head that posted the format /u fix. /u is an unconditional format of a drive not an unformat. If you are so lucky to have a fat 16 partition use the unformat command that came with dos 5.0 - 6.22. you will need to boot from the same version of dos boot disk though (and you thought that you would never need those 6.2 disks again...). If all else fails go get norton utilities 2000 or 2001.