Disk recovery options....
 

My friend has a problem with her computer.

She knows nothing about them, but she's trying to learn. So, in the mean time she has this idiot she knows doing all the routine stuff.

Anyway, he was dickering around and managed to quick format an 80GB drive with all her personal stuff on it. Once he realized what was happening he killed the power.

Now, I know the stuff is still there. Recovery software I've run on it sees all the "lost" files.

I know that it was a quick format, which my understanding leads me to believe that only the File Allocation Table (It was a FAT32 job) is erased. If I'm right, is there a way to just restore the FAT table and fix everything?

If it isn't possible, what are my other options? Recovering the files is possible, but I imagine it's going to be a very time consuming job and with holidays coming up, well, madness abounds :)

Any help is appreciated and comments are always welcome

I've exhausted my Google options, so I figured if anybody could help it's you guys

er.. the file allocation is the only thing thats erased in a quick format, but I dont know of any software that would recover lost files. Norton unerase does it for the recycle bin, but I havent tried it on an entire disk.

It could work though...

but give the guy a slap and make sure that no one touches anything labeled format, erase, delete, etc until they get smarter.

I'll certainly slap the guy around when I see him :D

What if I converted it to NTFS. From what I've read you can convert drives without losing data. So, wouldn't a conversion to NTFS just re-organize everything and slap a table to it?

Just throwing out some ideas, as I've never had to deal with this before. (I understand what format means :) )

Edited:

Could I use the Linux installer to rewrite a FAT32 table? When you're partitioning your drives it let's you mess around with the partitions without formating anything. (The format is the next step) Could I just re-write the FAT32 table and then quit the install?

there are lots of quick format recovery programs available
norton should do it, i use easy recovery professional, its a very good set of tools

if you convert it to ntfs youll wipe it out, since itll convert whats there, which presumably is nothing

you can do a fat32->ntfs without loosing data, but youve already lost it

most file recovery dont do in place, ie they copy to another drive, you can do in place but its messy
http://www.ontrack.com

theres a vast amount of free software to do this as well, a quick google with format recover or such should turn up loads

Try Easy Recovery 6.0 from OnTRACK (www.ontrack.com)
Simple FAT and NTFS (www.download.com
VirtualLAB (www.download.com)

all of those should be able to recover your data, ranging from 60-200 to do so. Data recovery isn't cheap =\

http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/download.htm
might work too its $29 the demo will allow you to find files it can recover, the full version allows actual recovery

it is optimized for images, but it can recover other files

I've got a good recovery tool. And I could go through and recover it and send it all over the place, but it's an 80GB drive and it'll probably take a very long time.

I was just looking for some quicker solutions.

Thanks for the links though ;)

leave it running overnite ;)