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can i recover data on a windows partition accidentally formatted with mac?

I have an external hard drive which had 3 windows partitions and I removed all the files of 1 partition to use that partition with macbook. Accidentally time machine formatted the wrong partition.
I am running bootcamp.
Is there a way to recover partition or data using leopard or windows, (Luckily it wasn't the partition with my photos on, i am looking for a cost free solution).
many thanks
AG

macbook, Mac OS X (10.5.2)

Posted on May 2, 2008 10:39 PM

Reply
4 replies

May 8, 2008 6:23 AM in response to portgriff

As has been indicated above, the probability of a successful data recovery in this case is low without the help of specialists.

To begin with, do not use that hard drive until you have found a way to deal with the partitions/files. Otherwise there is an immediate risk that anything recoverable becomes overwritten.

Professionals avoid working with the original hard drive at all. Instead, the hard disk is cloned (copied sector by sector) to another drive. Recovery attempts are made using the copy.

Recovery programs for Mac can be found, for example, here. You will have to investigate whether a certain Mac utility would be in a position to handle PC partitions and file systems (I guess that a good program should see anything written onto a disk; whether it can make use of that information is another matter).

Basically, it ought to be possible to try the data recovery on a PC, too. The same should apply here; a PC program might see the data bits, but would it be able to handle a Macintosh file system (and thus make something useful out of what it has found)? Check with the program supplier.

Anyway, do not reformat/repartition again. That is most certainly only going to make things worse.

Jan

can i recover data on a windows partition accidentally formatted with mac?

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