Accidental quick exFAT format of NTFS partition recovery

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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Author
hughesnick
Posts: 2
Joined: 05 Nov 2013, 08:01

Accidental quick exFAT format of NTFS partition recovery

#1 Post by hughesnick »

Hi there,
I haven't used this forum before so please bear with me if I provide too much info, as I desperately need help,
1. I have an HDD with dual boot, XP & Vista (both NTFS), I could boot into vista normally but XP only in safe mode. XP in normal mode crashed.
2. I tried to dskchk XP partition from vista, dskchk /f worked but dskchk /r caused crash
3. I tried dskchk /r boot time and that caused crash as well
4. removed HDD and put as external on a win8 box and copied all files from XP to back up, about 20 files couldn't be copied.
5. Tried dskchk /r from win8 box, got through step 4 repair bad sectors in user space but insufficient space error on step 5 repair bad sectors on free space
6. Then I completely messed up and accidentally QUICK formatted original XP partition to exFAT instead of the target partition on the win8 box that I was going to try and recover the XP partition to.
7. I bought ZAR Zero Assumption Recovery and it found the complete tree structure of the original XP NTFS partition that I quick formatted to exFAT but extremely slow due to bad sectors, also it couldnt recover about 20,000 files probably due to the sector skip interval being set to 32 on bad sector found in order to try and speed things up.
8. I know the original NTFS MFT tree structure is there as ZAR finds it, how can I restore the partition type from exFAT back to NTFS, it shows as NTFS not exFAT in test disk???

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