Data recovery after format

[l3ored]

I accidentally used HP's usb drive formatting tool to format my external drive to *i think* fat32. It was originally *i think* ntfs. a few seconds into the format, i realized I had this drive selected and not the flash drive I intended and canceled the format. all of my backed up data is on this drive including my personal photos and documents. are there any recovery tools in bt3 i can use to get my stuff back or am i sol? it was a 320gb drive with two partitions.

[loftrat]

Look up dd which you can use to image the drive.

Then look up software for recovering files from dd images.

[l3ored]

it sounds like that would make a 320gb file? unfortunately, i don't have anywhere to put something that big.

[wick86]

I accidentally used HP's usb drive formatting tool to format my external drive to *i think* fat32. It was originally *i think* ntfs. a few seconds into the format, i realized I had this drive selected and not the flash drive I intended and canceled the format. all of my backed up data is on this drive including my personal photos and documents. are there any recovery tools in bt3 i can use to get my stuff back or am i sol? it was a 320gb drive with two partitions.

Ya back track is probable not what you are looking for you need something more specific to data recovery like system rescue cd there is a program on it called photorec that might help you it allows you to recover specific file extinctions but you still need a large enough place to store them.

[williamc]

Backtrack has a forensic section, so it should be helpful in recovering your files. I'd start with booting Backtrack and mounting your NTFS volumes to see if you can recover anything that way. If that doesnt work, DD may be your best option:
http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=videos/autopsy1

William

[marten:10]

its a bit of a flackey program but i had a similar problem once with a fat partition, and was able to get most of the music, pictures and word files back off a pc using program called getdataback.

all i know is it worked and i was in a rush and it was someone elses data too. it appears to have an ntfs version too. sure there's tons of open source ways to do it too as described and hinted too above.........
http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-faq.htm

[Ninja]

for ease of use try: dd_rescue which comes built in backtrack

and then to extract the whole things in very cool way use foremost which also comes in backtrack

good luck