Help: Can HDD be recovered?

:cry:
I'd just download WinHIP and want to add some image of PS2 games to my PS2 HDD. But I clicked the wrong button "Copy to drive". it immediately started to format my XP HDD. Just a few second, I realised what the programme was doing and stopped it at once.

After that I found that my XP drive ID disappeared and the data cannot be recovered by several programme. Can any one tell me how to recover my data?

The data inside the disk is very immportant to me, please, please advise what should I do.

Thank you very much.

Kengi

More than likely, you'll need to get data recovery software like Easy Recovery Pro as it does a low level recovery from accidental formats and stuff. Of course....it doesn't understand the MBR of PS2s so there's no guarantees.

you might need to reinitialize the partition.... I think AEFdisk can do that.... It can recognize over 100 partition types... if I remember correctly it can partition a drive without deleting the info within (don't quote me on that).... It is available on www.downoad.com so you might want to give that a try....

It runs from the dos command line... your useing XP so you might need to setup a start up disk with NTFS support drivers.. not sure on that either... AEFdisk should read the drive fine... but if you want to access the data from the DOS propt you'll need the NTFS drivers. (I mostly work on older computers with 95 and 98 on them)

You might download a compy of Knoppix and see if you can use the burning software to back up data if windows can't see the data (Knoppix boots the complete enviroment from CD and doesn't install any files to HD). But most drive dumping programs should be able to view contents from drive with little difficulty.

also if you can read any data from the drive with a dumping tool you'll want to back up te data that didn't get erased and then mess with the recovery. Nothing sucks worse than trying to recover data and ending up killing more of it.

I've never attempted this myself (on XP)... I'e done a few things with 98 and 95.... it takes time... I've never had a simple fix for a corrupted drive. I use GoBack now so that helps with small problems (which a paritialy reformated and or repartitioned drive is not a small problem).

first thing, fdisk /mbr from a recovery console (acess it from the windows xp cdrom)
if that doesn't work, get another hard drive, install windows, then download (my fav) GetDataBack for NTFS, or GetDataBack for FAT. (depending on which FS you use). That can recover on a low level, you have to scan the drive overnight to find any recoverable data. Chances are, you can recover a good ammount of your data.

Knoppix can give you a GUI and tools to work with, although diagnostics on a NTFS drive will be tricky.

Then suggest to the author of winhiip to add in an option which checks for winodws on the drive before it starts copying!! :D