Bonehead award for April 28, 2004 goes to..

[redrumloa]

[Floid]

Given that it's a /Q, you have/had the option of the "UNFORMAT" utility, I think.

Dunno about NTFS.

[voxel]

:lol:

but did you tried unformatting?

[bloodmoney]

The good news is if you didn't write anything to the drive after the format, you may be able to recover any important data, email, docs etc.
Data recovery tools :-)

[bloodmoney]

The good news is if you didn't write anything to the drive after the format, you may be able to recover any important data, email, docs etc.
Data recovery tools :-)

[Cass]

Good luck, you gonna need it!
A couple of years ago, I had an accident with partition magic, and damaged my NTFS C: volume. I tried to find some recovery tools, but all were for FAT32, and some others apropriate for NTFS were either trial versions, or had limited functionality (support for 8.3 file names etc.) There were also those with a security trashcan (backup the deleted files, pretty useless in such a case).
The link provided above has some goodies, give a try and feedback ;-)
________
VZR1800

[odin]

I had to undelete some files too a while back from my NTFS partition. I never succeeded in finding any decent freeware undelete utils.

[bloodmoney]

PC Inspector File Recovery, has worked for me in the past.

[platon42]

Well... I've written an NTFS recovery program some years ago. For AmigaOS -- just because those NTFS recovery tools were so damn useless (either needed Windows NT to run (Win 98/ME was not enough) or couldn't operate on the same harddisk they were booted, or required Admin access, which we could not get hold of on another machine). In the end, it was able to recover most of the files that had been accidentially deleted during an Windows NT update process (don't you love that?). Otherwise, a PhD. thesis would have been lost (of course, no backups!) and the son of the author would have been 8 inch smaller.

[Floid]

Nnh, see, FORMAT /Q is the tipoff here; just running an "undelete" utility (of which there are many, if it's FAT) is going to be arduous, if it even works...  But the "Quick Format" is specifically nondestructive (just rewrites a new FAT, doesn't zero the disk... Since the FAT is completely rewritten, I'm not sure 'undelete' would function), and at least pre-Win95 (DOS 5) FORMAT would specifically "Save Unformat Information," ensuring a spare copy of the old FAT would be hidden around someplace.

The problem is that I do believe they dropped UNFORMAT, and possibly the whole feature, with '98 and the FAT32 support.  Not sure, though.