Help Please! I created a Windows partition on the wrong drive!

[ositosucio]

I am on Snow Leopard, 10.6.2.

Today I created a partition on the wrong drive ( where all my family pictures and videos are ) and now I can't access the drive at all.

I am guessing the files are still there but I am clueless on what to do..

This is what Disk Utility is reporting:


Verifying volume “disk0s2”
** /dev/disk0s2
Invalid BS_jmpBoot in boot block: 000000
Error: This disk needs to be repaired. Click Repair Disk.
Verifying volume “disk0s2”
** /dev/disk0s2
Invalid BS_jmpBoot in boot block: 000000
Error: This disk needs to be repaired. Click Repair Disk.
Verify and Repair volume “disk0s2”
** /dev/disk0s2
Invalid BS_jmpBoot in boot block: 000000
Volume repair complete.Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.



any help before my wife finds out and makes me sleep in the sofa?

 

[ositosucio]

anybody, please, im desperate....

 

[velocityg4]

You can try Stellar Phoenix. Unlike most Mac data recovery programs you can have it scan the entire drive regardless of the partition structure. Whereas Data Rescue and Disc Warrior won't scan anywhere that it does not detect the partition.

If this does not work initially and assuming your whole drive was formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). You can repartition the drive (don't secure erase) to being all Mac OS Extended (Journaled) again. Then run the full recovery scan. Simply repartitioning does not write data anywhere that it would normally have been stored.

Another program which will perform these low level scans is Nucleus Kernel Mac which is my favorite recovery program. But only works from Windows for some reason.

These scans can take many hours. Then the transfer can take many more.
You will need a large recovery drive as well. Since many duplicates of files can be created during a recovery. Also some files will lose their folder locations so there is a lot of sorting to do afterward to consolidate files and delete junk files.

 

[ositosucio]

You can try Stellar Phoenix. Unlike most Mac data recovery programs you can have it scan the entire drive regardless of the partition structure. Whereas Data Rescue and Disc Warrior won't scan anywhere that it does not detect the partition.

If this does not work initially and assuming your whole drive was formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). You can repartition the drive (don't secure erase) to being all Mac OS Extended (Journaled) again. Then run the full recovery scan. Simply repartitioning does not write data anywhere that it would normally have been stored.

Another program which will perform these low level scans is Nucleus Kernel Mac which is my favorite recovery program. But only works from Windows for some reason.

These scans can take many hours. Then the transfer can take many more.
You will need a large recovery drive as well. Since many duplicates of files can be created during a recovery. Also some files will lose their folder locations so there is a lot of sorting to do afterward to consolidate files and delete junk files.

thank you!..ill try these right and post back.

 

[ositosucio]

ok , with Stellar Phoenix I get NO DATA FOUND

when i try to run:
Quick Recovery or Formatted Media/Lost Recovery or Deleted File Recovery

the only option that works is Search Lost/Deleted Volumes.. this option starts scanning for data showing the different little color squares....

should i try this or the other software you listed?


thanks

 

[ositosucio]

i think I probably screwed this up. I just went into Disk Utility and deleted the FAT32 partition and repartioned the HD back to Mac Journaled... now I see the disk but it shows as empty...


did i just lose all my videos/pictures??

 

[Zerozal]

i think I probably screwed this up. I just went into Disk Utility and deleted the FAT32 partition and repartioned the HD back to Mac Journaled... now I see the disk but it shows as empty...


did i just lose all my videos/pictures??

Yes, by deleting a partition and re-partitioning, I believe you just erased the drive.

The good news is that all you have to do is copy over your photos and videos from your backup. (You do have a backup of your data, right?)

 

[DavieBoy]

My girlfriend was supposed to bring her macbook pro over so i could back it up again. So I deleted her backup. That day her pro was stolen.

I picked up data rescue 2 and ran it on the erased drive. It found everything. We only cared about the photos. Only thing is it doesn't know the names of files so you have to go through thousands of image files to find what you want. You get the hang of it though and learn to delete everything under 250kb ect.

 

[velocityg4]

i think I probably screwed this up. I just went into Disk Utility and deleted the FAT32 partition and repartioned the HD back to Mac Journaled... now I see the disk but it shows as empty...


did i just lose all my videos/pictures??

No not unless you then went to the erase tab's security options and chose to rezero or a 7 pass random wipe.

Do the formatted media/lost file recovery scan again. Now that the drive is formatted properly it should perform a detailed scan. Like I said in my post the scan would take a long time, you should assume 12 to 48 hours possibly a lot longer depending on the size and speed of your Hard Drive. It will also eat up most of a dual core processors resources during that time.

The scans did not work as the drives partition table was damaged. So as far as the different scan options were concerned there was nothing to scan. The extended scan takes so long because it reads the entire disk surface carefully. If your drive is 1TB then it needs to carefully scan 1TB.

If this does not find anything than yes I would use Nucleus Kernel Mac and perform it's extended scan option. I had great luck with Nucleus Kernel on a much more difficult recovery on a network drive detailed some in this post.

 

[Wotan31]

anybody, please, im desperate....

Just reformat the drive for HFS+ and restore your files from backup. Easy Peasy.

 

[ViViDboarder]

Just reformat the drive for HFS+ and restore your files from backup. Easy Peasy.

i think I probably screwed this up. I just went into Disk Utility and deleted the FAT32 partition and repartioned the HD back to Mac Journaled... now I see the disk but it shows as empty...


did i just lose all my videos/pictures??

OP already did reformat and never mentioned that they had a backup. And I imagine if there was a backup there'd be no problem.

Data recovery software is your only real option now. Sorry.

 

[Wotan31]

OP already did reformat and never mentioned that they had a backup. And I imagine if there was a backup there'd be no problem.

Data recovery software is your only real option now. Sorry.

Restoring from a backup can be time consuming if you have hundreds of GB. Perhaps the OP was just trying to save time by avoiding this? How do you know he doesn't have a backup? Backing up your files on OSX is so stupid easy (compared to doing the same on Windows or Linux) that only a fool would not make regular backups. Between Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner, it really doesn't get much more simple and easy.

 

[velocityg4]

Restoring from a backup can be time consuming if you have hundreds of GB. Perhaps the OP was just trying to save time by avoiding this? How do you know he doesn't have a backup? Backing up your files on OSX is so stupid easy (compared to doing the same on Windows or Linux) that only a fool would not make regular backups. Between Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner, it really doesn't get much more simple and easy.

Unfortunately most people are too scared to do any of this, are not concerned enough to figure out how backups work, think a new computer could not have any of these problems or simply are not aware that there is such a thing as making a backup nor that any such thing would ever be necessary.

I multiple different computers for ten years and numerous hard drives before I ever experienced a hard disk failure. Up until that time it never occurred to me that I should make a backup. Fortunately I was in high school at the time (so none of my files were important) and already owned a couple of computers so had backups of my data as I wanted the same files on all my computers. Networking was an expensive and daunting prospect in the System 7 days and did not make much sense as a dial up connection did not get shared.