Windows 7 x64 Partition "Quick" Formatted By Accident - HELP

[avid]

Hey there.. I'm stupid and here is my stupid story.. :S

My Main Boot drive is a 2 TB HD Partitioned in the middle (931GB on either side split between my C: Drive and my D: Drive) My C: Drive is.. well.. my C Drive, my boot disk etc. My D drive however is very precious and I NEED to recover it, I'm at a total loss if I don't. Why? It has all my music (MP3's also but I produce electronic music so all my samples also, but also all my main acid files like the songs themselves! I have no backup. Why? Because I'm stupid as previously mentioned, It also has YEARS of pictures taken from all my cellphones and cameras and again.. no backup. Why? See above.

Here is what happened. I was using an old copy of something called BART PE, a bootable custom Windows XP CD. While here I thought I would format a floppy disk while in a genuine windows xp session in preparation for a BIOS flashing I was about to do on a computer I'm building for my son. I right clicked the A drive and format etc and it didn't work. I closed the window and tried again this time: format/quick/go.

it said finish.. and then I realized.. it wasn't A I formatted, but D.

So a Windows 7 x64 partition quick formatted in a Win XP environment, rebooted and back into my Win 7 x64 environment trying to unFUBAR my FUBAR'd drive with basically my life on it.

I have played with testdisk I am familiar with DOS and other CLI shell programs but I am having trouble with this. I grabbed the x64 version and followed the "Recovery of reformatted partition" directions but I've found that my options as I get to them seem to be a little different from that of whats being offered in the program. Not sure if I strayed or if its because the x64 version is a little different?

I was wondering if knowing the details I've posted you might be able to post some step by steps so that I may recover this partition? As i said I floowed some directions and where I was supposed to see a file list, I didn't. In fact I didn't get that far, I got to "enter the value corresponding to the previous filesystem" and was lost. Not even sure if that was the way to go for situation?

Please help!

Thanks..

Rick

[Fiona]

Please use TestDisk6.14-32bit.
If you formatted your disk equal to the previous situation, you're overridding your previous file system.
In this case you need datarecovery software.
Did you format different FAT - NTFS vice versa you'd be able to use TestDisk to get your partition included your data back.
Please don't write or change anything to your drive anymore.
Your data are still underlying in your sectors.
Each write access can overwrite data.

Fiona

[avid]

Thanks so much for the speedy response. i swear each minute is an eternity when you're waiting on something like this..

ok, so i got "use the 32 bit version", right? ok i will but are you saying i can't use testdisk at all to fix this? My previous partition i need to recover is NTFS and I did a quick NTFS format in a win xp environment. (i doubt the environment makes much of a diff but I thought I'd mention it just in case) so NTFS => NTFS (Quick) is the situation.
since then i rebooted (i had to to get into my win 7 environment) all that was written was 3 folders and a couple log files i have written nothing to it that was done by the system.

so i need recovery software other than testdisk then or can this be salvaged with testdisk? i was under the impression that a quick format only modifies the partition header and not the actual data on the drive, as you just said more or less.. anyways..

thanks again for your help, fiona.

rick

[avid]

also..

if you are going to say testdisk will NOT help me (hoping thats not the case) and that i need to use recovery software, can you please suggest a specific program? ideally i'd like to reover the files within its proper directory structure. i have a LOT of stuff..

standing by.. literally..

thanks again.

rick