tried to create time machine partition on fat32 disk

Using TestDisk to repair the filesystem
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alkk
Posts: 1
Joined: 18 Jul 2020, 10:55

tried to create time machine partition on fat32 disk

#1 Post by alkk »

Hi,
I have a 2TB external fat32 disk which I was using in windows and mac.
I created a 200GB fat32 partition in windows then instructed time machine to format the partition (HFS+???) in order to create a time machine backup.
The disk is now unrecognised on windows and files are only viewable using data recovery software on mac.
Testdisk is taking hours to do a quick analysis. Perhaps there is a method to undo what I did?
Much appercated if you are able to help
Thanks,
Alan

recuperation
Posts: 2729
Joined: 04 Jan 2019, 09:48
Location: Hannover, Deutschland (Germany, Allemagne)

Re: tried to create time machine partition on fat32 disk

#2 Post by recuperation »

There is no method to recover overwritten stuff.

You can try out Testdisk to see if remaining parts of your partition can be restored based upon a backup sector in FAT32.
Using Photorec would yield good results when defragmentation was low on your partition.

When being unhappy with loosing metdata like subdirectories and file names a commercial recovery program might recover this metadata as well.

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