SOS -- please help

[N_Villers]

I did a nasty !! I for the first time am installing Windows XP on my mac with bootcamp in order to use metafuze. I installed a second HDD and my problem is that when going through that horrible blue screen I managed to delete the partition of my main OSX HDD. I realized my mistake right away and zero data has been written to the disk. There must be a way to retrieve it -- please any ideas :waaa: :sad:

 

[Vigen Vartanov]

Best solution is to connect your mac in Target mode to another Mac.
Connect 2 computers with Firewire cable , better 800 . Then when
turning on your pc press and holt T button .

Then run software for recovering files for mac , i will
found some software for you and will post it later. There is allot of
softwares like this , you will need to buy or just torrent some .

 

[N_Villers]

Well I'm trying this ATM. I have connected it via firewire to my laptop and am running a freeware program called testdisk. We'll see. Is there a better software out there? I need back into my system asap.

 

[N_Villers]

well... I have testdisk see a hfs+ partition but I'm scared to let it try to rebuild as this potentially can effect the disk. :excl: Mabye better off passing the buck along : (

 

[Kaku Ito]

Oh, no.

 

[michael zaletel]

This advice applies to ALL failed, lost, accidentally formatted or overwritten hard drives.

1. STOP
2. CALL A DATA RECOVERY SPECIALIST
3. SEND DRIVE TO DATA RECOVERY SPECIALIST

If you try to recover the data yourself, you will most likely cause more damage than good. If the data is important to you, send the drive to a professional service that a) knows what they are doing and b) has the latest tools and software and experience necessary. If the FBI can retrieve 95% of the files from hard drives erased 7 times and burned in a fire, there's still hope for your data but depending upon what you've already tried to do yourself to recover, it may be too late.

-shooter

 

[N_Villers]

So..... not to contradict the good advice given above but I was able to retrieve my partition finally. Much lost sleep -- or rather no sleep considering a 5am start to shooting today but all is well. Had to learn the arcana of partition maps and the pdisk command line interface commands but it DID work. Still feeling a bit like a nub. I thought I learned my medicine when I was eight and put my system folder into another folder. Just gonna have to blame it on microsoft. I mean jeez it only asks u twice f u want to delete the partition. :sarcasm:

 

[Fredrik Callinggard]

To retrieve the data is most probably gonna cost you as if you bought a new computer. Just so you know.

 

[Nir Shelter]

The size of the files has a great impact on the chance of full recovery.
4 years ago I had a HDD fail on me and go corrupt mid way through a project and needed to have it recovered. I understand that the place I took it to were very good and have been around for years. They were able to recover most of the text and music files but the data from the video files was not recovered well and the files unreadable as a result. They said that it could be that the files were too big. I don't know much about data recovery but I know that when lost media needs to be recovered... pray!
Your lucky you didn't need to recover large media files I'm glad it worked out for you in the end.