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jtreanor

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 9, 2007
2
0
Hello there,

I realize that there are many threads about recovering erased partitions and similar but my situation seems to be a bit different to any I can find.

So I have just bought a beautiful new retina Macbook Pro (and it's fantastic :D)! It is a big upgrade from my early 2009 white macbook. My plan was to do a fresh install of Lion on the macbook to give to a friend. However, in order to put the Lion image on my external hard drive I had to delete the only backup of the macbook (see where this is going ;)). I did this because resizing Fat32 partitions under mac is a royal pain. But not to worry I created a partition for the Lion image alongside a new backup partition that I would put my old home directory.

Low and behold an hour later I completely forgot I hadn't done the backup so immediately booted into the lion setup on the macbook, went into disk utility in the setup and erase the disk with a shiny new HFS+ partition. Of course as soon as I had tapped erase I remembered I hadn't backed up so as soon as it finished (a matter of seconds), I shut her down!

My question is two fold:
1) Now this is probably just wishful thinking but since disk utility literally takes 5 seconds to format the drive.. surely it is just flipping a few bits. Does this mean I could somehow flip these back? (Maybe just with a hex editor or something)

2) I know there are quite a few utilities such as those listed here: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1297667/ that allow partition recovery but is there any way I could run one of these without putting a mac install on the macbook? Something bootable? Perhaps from the Lion installer itself?

Thank you for reading all this! I really do appreciate it! :)

James!
 
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