How to unformat a PS2 HDD?

[CaptainHIT]

Is there a way? Because I accidentally (how stupid of me) used the FORMAT command in uLE's HddManager tool.

Before everybody starts to laugh at me and tells me that the FORMAT command is not for noobs I want to tell what happened:

I know what the command does and I was aware the HDD being formatted but I thought it'll format a "partition" only, like it's the way in PC's.
Lately there occured some error in the __boot "partition" of my 160GB HDD. I was copying all my "Beats of Rage" mods into it.
I've created a directory called "BOR", created other directories in it following the names of the mods and started copying all pak files into them. As it was going to take a lot of time, I first copied all pak's with their approperiate names into BOR directory. Because it was easy to select all pak's from the USB thumb drive and copy them all at once. When this was done, I started creating the directories in BOR and copy every pak file into it's own dir. I've used COPY command for that, not CUT. So copying every pak into it's own dir was working fine, till some problem appeared. I've selected a pak, went into it's directory and selected PASTE, but it didn't work somehow. The directory stayed empty. I went into the upper dir but it was empty. I left the FileBrowser, restarted it and went into "__boot" and seen the dirs and files were still in there, there were "all" of my SNES, Genesis and PCE roms in their own directories, MC-Backup folder with alot of saves and the Beats of Rage directory. But going into BOR I saw that some directories and pak files disappeared and some files were truncated showing 448k only (maybe because the bor.elf file was 448k too). Well, creating the needed directories and copying around the last paks and renaming them to bor.pak was working fine, also the BOR games started fine. Till I found out that there was a problem with SNES-Station. Nearly 80% of the roms vanished from the list, and running a rom didn't work, it just came back to the SNES-Station menu. I wondered about what triggers this and started uLE. Going into "__boot\SNES\" directory is fine. I could see the leftover roms in there. But when changing back to upper directory "__boot\" all directories and files weren't there. Looked like empty. Quitting the FileBroweser (not uLE) and starting it again, going into "__boot\" all files and directories were there. Also everything runs fine and works, only the "SNES" dir caused problems. All other directories and files were working fine. Entering the SNES directory and leaving it (changing to upper directory) and everything looks like gone. So I thought about reformatting only this "_boot" partition to get rid of this problem. So I copied all files leaving the SNES dir with it's roms to the "__common" partition, then started HddManager, selected the entry "__boot" from the right and pressed R1 and selected "Format".

After formatting finished, my eyes went like this:

Because all HDL partitions were gone, I had a full clean HDD for start everything from the beginning.

I wished there would prompt a requester telling me that this command will format the entire HDD instead of the selected partition; if that would happen, I would at least copy my saves to a safe place before going on. I had to format it anyway because of this "SNES" directory problem.

And for the SNES directory problem, I'm not sure what caused it, and why it affected the SNES directory even I didn't touch it, only the BOR directory.

If you're interested, my HDD is a slim Maxtor 160GB. All system partitions were set to it's max capacities, ie "__mrb 256MB", "__net 256MB", "__system 512MB", "__sysconf 512MB", "__common 4096MB" and "__boot 4096MB". I held those partitions big because I wanted to keep my roms and homebrew stuff on the HDD instead of USB thumb drive. Dunno if that caused the problem, because after format I've seen they have shrinked to their default sizes.

That was a long story for today, I hope you people didn't got bored because of it. Thanks in advance for any help, if any.

[Northbear]

Try to restore the structure of the HDD with WinHip.

Maybe this will restore your custom files and settings too.

It's worth a try, better than to start everything from scratch.

I have chosen the opposite and save everything to USB so i can back it up easily on PC.

Best regards
Northbear

[barf]

You can also back everything up with dd in Linux, maybe CCC(Mac) or Ghost(Win) will work too?

[izdubar]

STOP all !

You can restore the partitions easily, without any loss, if you do the right actions now.

You need one tool, it is called "testdisk" :

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

It's one of the most powerful program for this kind of task, it saves my life (friends life in fact) many times ...

[Northbear]

I doubt that any linux or windows tool can handle PFS system. You can try it but i doubt that these tools will work because only the PS2 use this files system so it's hard to find other tools beside winhiip that can handle it.

[pio_masaki]

I have formatted a HDL HDD before, and after a single format seen games come back, but only 2 out of 28. Restore structure in winhiip is your only real hope. And for future repairs of your HDL HDD, use winhiip, it has a feature to scan and repair the file system, in case this happens again, it might fix it before you have to format.

[izdubar]

I doubt that any linux or windows tool can handle PFS system. You can try it but i doubt that these tools will work because only the PS2 use this files system so it's hard to find other tools beside winhiip that can handle it.

Ooppss .... PFS ? didn't knew that

TestDisk can find lost partitions for all of these file systems:

* BeFS ( BeOS )
* BSD disklabel ( FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD )
* CramFS, Compressed File System
* DOS/Windows FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32
* Windows exFAT
* HFS, HFS+ and HFSX, Hierarchical File System
* JFS, IBM's Journaled File System
* Linux ext2 and ext3
* Linux LUKS encrypted partition
* Linux RAID md 0.9/1.0/1.1/1.2
o RAID 1: mirroring
o RAID 4: striped array with parity device
o RAID 5: striped array with distributed parity information
o RAID 6: striped array with distributed dual redundancy information
* Linux Swap (versions 1 and 2)
* LVM and LVM2, Linux Logical Volume Manager
* Mac partition map
* Novell Storage Services NSS
* NTFS ( Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008/7 )
* ReiserFS 3.5, 3.6 and 4
* Sun Solaris i386 disklabel
* Unix File System UFS and UFS2 (Sun/BSD/...)
* XFS, SGI's Journaled File System

Failed ...

[barf]

I doubt that any linux or windows tool can handle PFS system. You can try it but i doubt that these tools will work because only the PS2 use this files system so it's hard to find other tools beside winhiip that can handle it.

dd works for backing up internal PS3 HDD and internal PS2HDD.

[Northbear]

does dd work for full backup or partial too ?

If yes it would be third tool that i know that can handle PSF

[barf]

does dd work for full backup or partial too ?

If yes it would be third tool that i know that can handle PSF

Only full AFAIK,
the PS2 HDDs work in other PS2 consoles when dd-ed but the one where it was made,
I have not yet tested if PS3 HDD works on other PS3 consoles from the one that formatted the HDD,
it sure works in the same PS3 console from a different or bigger HDD.