Not formatted?!?!? I had all my school documents on that disk!
 

Sorry for the dramatic subject, but I feel a bit panicky right now.
I just plugged my 8 Gb Seagate HD, into my family computer and wanted to open a file I'd saved on it for school.
I double click on D and the first thing I notice is that it's unnamed, the second thing I notice is that windows wants me to format the drive.

Everything was fine when I mounted it on my SuSe machine and copied some stuff off it. After that I didn't use it any more for a while and now I want to use it again and suddenly it's unformatted. :eek:

I tried to mount it on my (now Debian, in a fit of anger I threw SuSe away as it wouldn't let me install Mplayer) Linux machine, but it says that there are no valid partitions on it.

Partition Magic, Debian Linux and Windows all say the drive is just dandy, except that it is unformatted and windows adds that it would be thrilled to do the formatting for me.
This off course is not what I want. I WANT MY DATA BACK! Can anyone offer me any suggestions as to what to do now?

I can handle windows not recognising a drive or finding error with it, but I'm baffled as to what to do now.

Oh and by the way, when I try to scan it with an updated Norton, it seems to find 22 files on the disk. :confused:

Partition magic has the following to say:
<table>
<tr>
<td colSpan=8>
Partition Information for Disk 2: 8,205.1 Megabytes
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
Volume </td><td>PartType</td><td>Status</td><td>Size MB </td><td>PartSect</td><td>#</td><td>StartSect</td><td>TotalSects</td></tr><tr>
<td></td><td>Unallocated</td><td>Pri</td><td>7.8 </td><td>None</td><td>--</td><td>63</td><td>16,002</td>
</tr><tr><td></td><td>ExtendedX</td><td>Pri</td><td>8,197.2 </td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>16,065</td><td>16,787,925
</tr><tr><td></td> <td>EPBR</td><td>Log</td><td>8,197.2</td><td>None</td><td>--</td><td>16,065</td><td>16,787,925</td>
</tr><tr><td>D:</td><td>FAT32</td><td>Log</td><td>8,197.2 </td><td>16,065</td><td>0</td><td>16,128</td><td>16,787,862</tr></table>

Sorry, my experience is with FAT and NTFS formats. If no one here can help, you can try a data recovery service. It'll cost you but if the data's worth it...

Good luck.

Sounds like the drive is fine, and the data is still there. It's just not mounting correctly for one reason or another. Work with it in linux and try and get it to mount. Get a local linux guru to work at it.

It's odd how there are 3 file system entries for the same sectors. I know fat32, but I am not familiar with the other two.

http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/epbr.shtml

Sounds like a virus executed at some point and fubared the disk. Probably deleted some of the metadata necessary for the disk to mount. You need a professional to recover it.

[EDIT] Actually I could be totally off base. It could also stand for Extended Partition Boot Record. I think that some nonstandard mojo was involved in formatting the drive so debian doesn't know how to mount it now. [/EDIT]

Did you try mounting it on a SuSe machine again? You mentioned it last worked on that OS.

As for professional data recovery, get your hands on a suite of recovery tools from Winternals, and try using the Disk Commander application. That's what they use. Unless of course they disassemble the drive and physically move the platters to another medium for recovery. This requires clean rooms and other high tech equipment, and will indeed cost AT LEAST a few thousand dollars.

I have successfully recovered several hard drives which had been reformated with this application (fat, fat 32, ntfs, ntfs 5.0). I mean all of it. Blew my mind.

Also, rack your brain for other places you might have copied the files, like an email you sent someone, a floppy, maybe burned to CD, on a friends PC, an assignment you turned in? Who knows it might be out their somewhere.

Good luck,

-bear

You might also consider doing a raw dump on the whole disk. This is possible using "dd" on Linux. Then you can try to recover your data from the dump without messing with the original disk. Won't be easy, though. :(

Ontrack easy recover professional, if it can't get it back, pretty much nothing can except a data recovery specialist house, which ontrack is, they also have a crisis center in the software to help you out.

was there originally two partitions ?

This is totally off-topic but who is that in your avatar?! Yum.

p.s. One of my friends is a Linux instructor at a Tertiary Institution, I just e-mailed him the details of your first post. Here's hoping he hasn't gone on holiday yet.