[RESOLVED] Oh Dear I Formatted The Wrong Drive

[Nix]

Last night I was going to do a clean install of Win2000 on my triple booting system.

I booted to the DOS prompt in Win98 and formatted the wrong drive thus wiping my WinMe installation.

I quickly booted into Win98, install PC Inspector Recovery and scanned the drive partition that WinMe was installed on.

It found some 100 folders with about 5000 files.

The top level folder for each is called Cluster nnnnnnn where nnnnnnn represents a cluster number.

As it was now 1.45am I decided to leave all alone and get some sleep.

Is this as good as it gets, is there some way to unformat or do I just have to save all those Cluister nnnnnnn folders.

My last backup using ghost was done on 17th August so potentially we're talking 11 days of file changes / mail etc.

[HAN]

I know of no way to unformat. And IMO, it's kind of a crap shoot as to how much success retrieving your files would be. Is 80% good enough? 70%? 50%? If it were mine, I would restore.

I suppose you could do both. Retrieve as many files as you can and then restore anyway.

Either way, it stinks!

[Nix]

I think I will save .dbx files, .docs and .jpgs as that's about all that's probably been updated in the last 11 days.

Other than updates for Ad-Aware, Spybot, Avast and A-Squared but they can all be downloaded again.

Then restore from ghost image and replace from saved files where necessary - darn you format command

[Crimson Blonde]

sorry to hear of your troubles Nix That really stinks

[Nix]

Hmmm I think I've been here long enough to know better and also know that there is no magic undo but.........hopefully with a clear head and being a bit more awake I can retreive as much as possible, restore from my 11 day old image and then copy files back.

[gioannou]

The program is actually reaaaallly easy actually I tested it yesterday for a friend(with no success )and Help describes all that easy tasks.
Another friend has told me that it has worked for him.
However, it's not THAT strong - that is, it cannot do miracles...
Use the search function just to find anything specific that you might miss from the past 10 days.
The cluster folders...I really didn't make anything out of it.
But since you didn't make any kind of operations on the disk you'll be able to revive many stuff.(I guess)
Fragmentation can cause trouble...
Glad to hear that u backed up.

[fink]

Worth looking at..

http://www.partition-recovery.com/

They have a trial version so you can see how much you may be able to recover.

[Nix]

I managed to save the 3 documents that had been updated during the 11 days, but the Outlook Express .dbx files weren't so successful basically 2 out of about 16 worked.

Size wise they seem like they should have stuff in them, but when opened / imported they are just empty.

[fink]

Try this dbx viewer program..

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/dbxviewer.html

They may get more info out of them if they can't be opened by OE due to corruption.

[Nix]

Thanks I'll give it a try

[buf]

Nix, have you had success? I haven't had anything to contribute but I have been looking in on this with interest and wishing you success. Just thinking of you.

[Nix]

No the DBX viewer was of no help and i have now moved on from this.

[quicksilver65]

if you can find, DIR00003\OPTIONS\INSTALL

It will reinstall windows. You will need the product key number.

This worked for a friend. She did not lose anything.

Someone had deleted windowsME file.

Hope this helps

[photolady]

I think that since this post is several months old quicksilver and Nix has admitted he's moved on with this problem, he no longer needs advice on how to recover. Please pay attention to the dates before posting a reply in the future.

With that said, I'm closing this old thread.