Erased a disk i should not have

[simondevon]

Quick question for the experts.

I have a firewire drive attached to my mac book pro c2006 running 10.6.8. In a moment of stupidity in disk utility i selected this drive and pressed erase. watching it for a few moments and in panic switched the drive off.

Is there any way of recovering the data or a program that will recover my data? Or does a fool and his data find they are parted.

Simon.

 

[maz-o]

Google "recovery software mac".

I've found they usually work pretty well, although they don't find 100% of the deleted stuff. Also, don't know if your disk got some damage with that power-off during format. Give it a try.

 

[cjoy]

I used DataRescue for a similar issue and it worked really well.
It is not free and the recovery will take its time, but it should recover most of your files unless they have been overwritten.

 

[laurihoefs]

TestDisk is a very nice tool to recover accidentally formatted volumes: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

It reads the disk through and recovers the partition table, so there is no need to transfer any files on another drive, like some other tools require you to do. And it's also free.

 

[Astroboy907]

The above posts will really help with data recovery. Personally I have used data recovery to get 90 some pictures off an SD card that was "erased". You will probably be able to get most of your data off.

Also depends on how you were erasing. If you did not do the "secure erase" with passes for writing zeros, I think all the computer does is tell the disk it is empty, but not actually change the data on the disk until something needs that space and overwrites it.

 

[simondevon]

thanks all

ill try looking for some of this software, a few quid is not a problem if it works.

Simon.