cyrnel

I feel for you. It's easier to make this kind of error at home when not under "professional" pressure. Especially easy without your usual assortment of tools, utilities, parts. Small compromises or changes in routine build, bad things get worse, and soon I'm kicking myself in the ass with both feet.

If it helps at all take some consolation that most home users put less importance in their data disappearing than those of us who spend mucho time with computers. Of course, losing photos, financial data, or a serious gamer's saves might mean you're on dish-duty for quite some time.

I'd try GetDataBack or one of the other recovery utils. You may have written over important pieces but these filesystem forensic utils are pretty good about getting files that haven't been written over, even if their directory entries are toast. First thing though, pull the drive. Do the recovery on a box you know isn't going to access the drive. No chkdsk, no indexing, no nothing.

BTW, my last self-ass-kicking display was shortly after fighting an nForce SATA RAID setup so thank you very much for reminding me of that failure.

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There are a vast number of people who are uninformed and heavily propagandized, but fundamentally decent. The propaganda that inundates them is effective when unchallenged, but much of it goes only skin deep. If they can be brought to raise questions and apply their decent instincts and basic intelligence, many people quickly escape the confines of the doctrinal system and are willing to do something to help others who are really suffering and oppressed." -Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, p. 195