OH F$%%!! Deleted HDloader drive (games and all). Anyway to recover it back?

[vincatzero]

Hello. I had a 200GB hard drive in my ps2 for games. I just got done patching Jak 3 and plugged the 200 into my pc to transfer it. I got sidetracked and when i came back forgot that it was in there. I had to reinstall windows for another reason and in the XP partition screen i told it to delete the partition.
Nothing was written over it because i realized what i had done as soon as I did it.

I put the drive back in the ps2 and it said i had to format it. All my other ones are 40GB so I couldn't copy it if i found a way.

I'm currently running "GetDataBack for FAT" but that's going to take 4 hours and i'll need to copy the games onto another drive, format the 200GB, then copy them back.

If anybody knows of a way to just recover it the way it was, please let me know.

[jeex]

you might try winhiip.. its pretty good at diagnosing messed up drives.. but most likely you're screwed.

[vincatzero]

there's no program anybody can think of that would let me recover the data off the hard drive, format it, and transfer it all back? getdataback for fat always seems to freeze at the very end (after 4 hours).

Does the HD loader even use FAT?

[Stefy2]

no it uses CDFS into partition

[vincatzero]

oh, well anyway to recover that?

[b081]

You might try to hex-edit a little. After all, it depends how much damage Windows have done. In case it wiped out only the first few megabytes you might be able to save the games.

However, there is no way of doing that without making your hands dirty. You should fetch some sources and check how partitions are organized. That is a doubly-linked list where each entry starts at multiple of 128MB and each header is exactly 1KB long. That means, that if you locate the start of the first partition after the __mbr and the last partition on the HDD you might recreate __mbr partition and tell it which is the next one and which is the previous one...