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pl626 (IS/IT--Management)
12 Jul 10 14:22
I was in the process of turning my USB drive into a bootable drive, when I selected  the wrong disk and ran a CLEAN command.  Fortunately, the disk was not a system disk ( I have three system partitions on two physical disks-WINXP SP3, Vista Ulti and 7 Ulti).  I was in the Windows 7 OS when I ran DISKPART.  I did not realize I selected the wrong disk until after the CLEAN operation completed successfully.

When I realized two of my logical drives were missing (both were on a WD500G drive; one drive is purely data, the other has some WINXP programs). I went into the windows disk mgmt mmc and found the physical disk and reassigned it a drive letter in my panic.  I then went into Windows Explorer and created a new folder and share. Then I realized I just violated the first rule of data recovery after an accidental format, don't touch anything.

Since then I've run several s/w tools (Pandora, GetDataBack, TestDisk, RecoverMyFiles, Stellar).  All have not been able to find anything.  I have not tried any RAW tools yet, but before I do, I was wondering what are my options at this point?  The data is a mixture of .pdf, MS Office files (from XP thru 2007 formats), .txt, .iso and other archives, some .exe.  and various multimedia.  It's a mixture of personal and business data, so obviously, I'd like to recover it, but I can' spend much more time on this.  Do I have any DIY options or should I go to a DR service?

Thanks for your advice!
kjv1611 (TechnicalUser)
13 Jul 10 7:24
With the list of programs you mentioned, since you didn't get anything back, I'd highly suggest a DR service at this point.  You could try running something totally outside the OS, such as a Linux Live CD, like Ubuntu.  Another option is the UltimateBootCD - runs totally outside OS, and you could scan with a program from there.  Active also has a bootable CD for it's undelete/partition restore programs.

But if you already cleaned it, and then did some stuff after, then your chances of recovery are growing slimmer for sure.  If you do want to have any further hope of recovering anything, be sure to not use that disk anymore for anything until you've given up hope of recovery.

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