HELP!!timemachine formatted my external drive

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gvinodbabu Author

Level 1

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HELP!!timemachine formatted my external drive

dear support,

I have a macbook pro and it is in extended warranty. serial number C0******FT1.

I wanted to take back up of my contents as i was nearing my exhaustion of 500 GB space.

So this is what i did.

1. I have only one hard drive which is 2TB and it is windows formatted.

2. i released 500 GB in that using windows tool to ensure i dont loose my data.

3. then i connected the drive to mac and opened time machine.

4. it detected only the 500GB partition and said do you want to use this for time machine. i SAID OK.

5. it erased the complete data of 1 TB in it (which was in windows format)

this being the story, i can understand that mac just would have erased the MBR or some important information that is required for the drive to be identified. but data would not be lost. because the operation of setting the disk took hardly a second.

Can you please help me what instructions should i follow so that i can recover the data.

your help would be lifesaving as I have all my lifetime data into that.

thanks and regards

vinod

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Yosemite (10.10.5), null

Posted on Aug 28, 2015 2:04 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Aug 28, 2015 2:29 PM in response to gvinodbabu

Time Machine requires a backup drive use GUID partition scheme, not MBR. Time Machine repartitioned your drive for that reason. You cannot make such a change for a single partition on an MBR partitioned drive.

Requirements to use Time Machine

Time Machine is only available with Leopard or later.

External FireWire or USB 2.0 drive
Time Capsule
Drive shared by a Mac running 10.5 or later using File Sharing
Drive shared by a Mac running 10.5 Server
SAN volume managed by Apple's Xsan file system

A TM drive must be partitioned with either APM (PPC) or GUID (Intel) and formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled.)

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Answer 2

gvinodbabu Author

Level 1

0 points

Aug 28, 2015 4:41 PM in response to Kappy

Lappy, thanks for your kind reply. What should I do to recover the data. Can you please help me with steps. Any link where I can get help is also good for me. Just want to know how to approach to get data recovered

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Answer 3

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Aug 28, 2015 4:50 PM in response to gvinodbabu

You would need to use recovery software, but I'm not familiar with Windows software, so I don't know what to suggest. As for OS X see below:

General File Recovery

If you stop using the drive it's possible to recover deleted files that have not been overwritten by using recovery software such as MAC Data Recovery, Data Rescue II, File Salvage or TechTool Pro. Each of the preceding come on bootable CDs to enable usage without risk of writing more data to the hard drive. Two free alternatives are Disk Drill and TestDisk. Look for them and demos at MacUpdate or CNET Downloads. Recovery software usually provide trial versions that enable you to determine if the software would help before actually paying for it. Beyond this or if the drive has completely failed, then you would need to send the drive to a recovery service which is very expensive.

The longer the hard drive remains in use and data are written to it, the greater the risk your deleted files will be overwritten.

Also visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on Data Recovery.

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