fat32 / hfs partition

[newerai]

I have a lacie 320gb mobile hdd, which came formatted in FAT32. I have used it on several PC's and my girlfriends mac ibook g4 with no problems.
The other day I plugged it into a new mac laptop with the lepoard OS.
An app called time machine started up without asking me any questions and activated itself, thinking my hdd was a backup drive. I switched it off as soon as I was able (time machine), but since I havent been able to access any of the other / previous data on the drive. I have quite a few photos on here from a recent 6 week trip on here, so I really would not like to lose them. I believe the data is still there, however now when I plug it into the Ibook G4 it says that the drive is a HFS partition (which it never was before). Any ideas on how to get the data off, or more ideally restore my FAT32 partition??

 

[Siron]

I can't help you with the data retrieval but I am a little curious as to how it

'called time machine started up without asking me any questions and activated itself'

Whenever you open TM in preferences for the first time and turn TM on it will give you the option of selecting which HD to use as the backup - it just doesn't go through this procedure on its own. I think what happened is that you must have been using TM to back up to another connected disk and as soon as you connected the new one it started a backup session thinking the original disk was still connected.
Strange.
Alan

 

[ruskiwi]

Strange - it should have asked you if you wanted to use that drive for backing up to, especially if you had another drive set up for TM.

 

[Siron]

Strange - it should have asked you if you wanted to use that drive for backing up to, especially if you had another drive set up for TM.

That's what I would have thought. Also as the disk was formatted with NTFS TM would not have recognized it - or at the very least (as you pointed out) asked if you wanted to use it and then re-formatted it. I had my TM disk formatted before I ran TM so I'm not sure if TM does this for you or not.
In any case still very strange.
Alan

 

[newerai]

fat/32 hfs

Ok,
it was formated FAT32, but perhaps you are right.
Does anyone know what time machine does when it accepts a new HDD?
A low level format, or a change partition?

.

 

[Siron]

Ok,
it was formated FAT32, but perhaps you are right.
Does anyone know what time machine does when it accepts a new HDD?
A low level format, or a change partition?

.

As I said in my post, TM should ask if you wanted to use the disk for backups. if you accidentally hit YES without knowing it, TM would (presumably) format it for Mac OS Extended (Journaled). In which case it would have wiped your Windows Files. There may be a disk utility such as Disk Warrior that may recover them but someone else with more experience would have to answer that.
Alan