Can ZAR recover/undo a "Quick Format"

[AlanB]

I have a Dell laptop D610 which is dual bootable w/ Windows 2000 and Windows XP Professional. It has a 40 GB drive equally divided (about 19MB for each partition). And it was recently defragmented.

Volume C: is Win2000
Volume D: is DVD/CD drive
Volume E: is Win XP pro. It has three user ID all of of which have administrator privlidges.

Both C: & D: are NTFS

Recently I discovered a malware and decided to copy all all my files to an external 80GB USB drive. The drive was recognized by XP but would not mount or assign a volume because it was FAT32 - or so I think that was the reason. When booted under Win2K the external drive was reccognized an assigned a drive letter.

So I decided to convert the external drive to NTFS so it could be recoggnized and mounted by both OS's. I right clicked on a volume and selected "Format", then selected "Quick Format" and "Start". The volume type was set to NTFS.

I immediately (too late) observed that I had right clicked on the "E:" drive ( my XP volume with ALL MY DATA) by mistake.

Afterwards the XP boot option no longer works.

Will ZAR recover or reverse this mistake so I can recover the 8 GB of data I NEED off of this volume?

Or is there another utility out there that will do this? I have Partition Magic.

I'm looking for a difinitive answer - not theory or guess to try.
For now I am not doing anthing that will write to that drive.

Should I try to image what is left on the drive to another drive and do the recovery on the newly imaged drive.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Alan

[Alexey V. Gubin]

So you reformatted E:, which was NTFS and it is now an empty NTFS partition. XP boot option does not work because the XP installation is gone. However, Windows 2000 should boot normally, because damage is limited to that E: drive.

It is reasonably safe to boot into Windows 2000 UNLESS there was a swap file placed on E:.

You will need about 10 GB free space where to place the recovered data. ZAR does not modify the drive. It will copy the files it finds to the destination you specify, but you must not use E: as a destination (avoid writes to E: at all costs). So this leaves us with the following options:

• Free about 10GB on a drive C: (that leaves us with about 9GB useable capacity on it, not quite comfortable).
• Make that 80GB USB drive work, then use it to store recovered files.

If you opt to use 80GB USB drive, you'd better format it on some other machine.

Once you are all set (attach the external drive; make sure it works in Windows 2000; download and install ZAR into Windows 2000), follow the unformat procedure.

Given the circumstances, I expect this to be a successful recovery. Although no "100% guarantee" is possible in data recovery, a formatted NTFS volume is typically recovered quite well.

[Alexey V. Gubin]

The disk image file is typically used in two cases

1. The disk is physically damaged/problematic. The image is used as a backup in case the disk fails completely.
2. We're going to make some modification to the disk, and the image allows us to roll back in case the modification does not produce the desired result.

In your case, neither of these conditions exist. Hence, making the image file is not mandatory.

However, if you decide to create the image file anyway, you need to make a 80GB USB disk work, and format it with NTFS. Once this is done, boot into the Windows 2000 installation and create the disk image from there.

To create a disk image with ZAR, start recovery as usual (refer to the tutorial); when prompted to select a physcial disk to recover, right click the disk, select "Create an image file". This would take a while. Make sure you store the file on the external (USB) disk, NOT on a volume E:.

[Howard G]

I have a similar problem, I 'quick formatted' my D: drive instead of a CD WR (it was late and I was tired ) and lost my itunes library and a couple of movies etc. about 50GB in total

I downloaded and ran the trial version and it seemed to find all the data, I understand that it will only rescue 4 folders and will need to purchase the full version.

I do have a few questions

How much space will I need to free up on my C: drive for a recovery.
Is there any advice you can give me before I get the full version and attempt to recover my D:

Thanks in advance for all you help

HG

[Alexey V. Gubin]

Disk space: you need to accomodate the recovered data, plus I suggest that you have about 10-15% spare capacity. For 50 GB of data, that's about 55-57GB free space required.

Other advice: None. Just proceed the same as with the trial version.

[baldev]

Originally Posted by AlanB

I have a Dell laptop D610 which is dual bootable w/ Windows 2000 and Windows XP Professional. It has a 40 GB drive equally divided (about 19MB for each partition). And it was recently defragmented.

Volume C: is Win2000
Volume D: is DVD/CD drive
Volume E: is Win XP pro. It has three user ID all of of which have administrator privlidges.

Both C: & D: are NTFS

Recently I discovered a malware and decided to copy all all my files to an external 80GB USB drive. The drive was recognized by XP but would not mount or assign a volume because it was FAT32 - or so I think that was the reason. When booted under Win2K the external drive was reccognized an assigned a drive letter.

So I decided to convert the external drive to NTFS so it could be recoggnized and mounted by both OS's. I right clicked on a volume and selected "Format", then selected "Quick Format" and "Start". The volume type was set to NTFS.

I immediately (too late) observed that I had right clicked on the "E:" drive ( my XP volume with ALL MY DATA) by mistake.

Afterwards the XP boot option no longer works.

Will ZAR recover or reverse this mistake so I can recover the 8 GB of data I NEED off of this volume?

Or is there another utility out there that will do this? I have Partition Magic.

I'm looking for a difinitive answer - not theory or guess to try.
For now I am not doing anthing that will write to that drive.

Should I try to image what is left on the drive to another drive and do the recovery on the newly imaged drive.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Alan

i whant recover my data

[Alexey V. Gubin]

See this:
http://www.z-a-recovery.com/unformat-tutorial.htm