External hard drive formatting issue - Need help!

[Zeeble]

Hi guys,

I really need some help and advice.

Today I formatted my computer and reinstalled XP. My external hard drive was still plugged in and showed up as a partition. By accident I then deleted both my local partition and the external hard drive partition.

I then went ahead and formatted the local drive and reinstalled XP.

When I booted up the PC it should the external hard drive as a local disk, but wouldn't allow me to access it unless I format it. Unfortunately I have/had important stuff on there and really need to access it.

My question is, whether there is a program which will help me recover the materials which are on the hard drive. I'm guessing that this should be possible given the fact that I didn't format the drive just delete the partition, right?

Thanks!

 

[snowbird]

It may be possible that you have just simply deleted the File Allocation Table. That is what they call it when you delete a partition. Seeing that it is an external hard drive, no data is being written to it. This is a good thing. The file allocation table is basically a table of contents telling where each file is located on the drive. In theory when you delete a partition or do a quick format, a new file allocation table is created and as you save data to the disk, it begins to write over your old data. So whatever you do, do not save anything to your external drive. I would then look into getting some software to help recover lost data on that drive. There are many products out there to help with this task however I cannot recommend anything specific since I have never ran into this situation before. Although I am sure many people do.

 

[turnhardtoeasy]

I too faced almost the same problem and my harddisk doesn't open normally
so i use a software from this site handyrecovery dot com to recover my files
obviously not my site :D
hope it works for u

 

[Zeeble]

That's great, thanks for the assurance snowbird. Certainly stopped me from sweating! Rep left.

---------- Post added at 11:33 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:32 PM ----------

Thanks Turn, I'll check it out. Did this definitely work for you?

 

[turnhardtoeasy]

M still using it...
recovers everything for me

want screenshots
hehe

ny ways try the free version 1st

 

[Zeeble]

Of course you don't need to provide any proof for me. Just wanted to double check. But since you said, you're right, I noticed that the free version is available anyway!

Rep added.

 

[el canadiano]

Hi guys,

I really need some help and advice.

Today I formatted my computer and reinstalled XP. My external hard drive was still plugged in and showed up as a partition. By accident I then deleted both my local partition and the external hard drive partition.

I then went ahead and formatted the local drive and reinstalled XP.

When I booted up the PC it should the external hard drive as a local disk, but wouldn't allow me to access it unless I format it. Unfortunately I have/had important stuff on there and really need to access it.

My question is, whether there is a program which will help me recover the materials which are on the hard drive. I'm guessing that this should be possible given the fact that I didn't format the drive just delete the partition, right?

Thanks!

If you formatted your external hard drive, tough. It's really unfortunate when something like that happens. A format unfortunately wipes the drive clean.

 

[Zeeble]

If you formatted your external hard drive, tough. It's really unfortunate when something like that happens. A format unfortunately wipes the drive clean.

I think you misunderstand. I didn't format the hard drive, simply delete the partition when reinstalling windows.