On Thu, 16 Mar 2006 14:54:33 -0800, Robert Persson wrote: > On Thursday 16 March 2006 09:15 Nick Smith was like: >> i just accidentally blew away my ntfs partition with the gentoo >> install cd (formatted hda1 instead of hdb1) is there a way to unformat >> if it was just done? like undo the format information? i formatted >> with ext3. > > IMPORTANT: Please don't follow the following advice until you have had a > second opinion from someone else—I think this will work, but I can't swear it > will: > Good advice...
> Reformat to NTFS and then use a recovery tool. If I remember right, windows > fdisk is pretty insistent on doing a low level format, so you would be safer > using the gnu tool for formatting. I don't know whether the gnu ntfs tools > are up to the recovery job, or whether you need to use something proprietary. > No. fdisk does not formatting at all. It just writes to the partition table. People run fdisk /mbr for example to rewrite the master partition table. I still think it may be better to edit the partition table directly and change the filetype of the partition to NTFS: type 0x07. Even if cfdisk you can change the type on the fly. Then reboot and see if you can mount it. fdisk is non-destructive to the partition's data. It's the format command where you have to make a choice to do a quick format or a complete one. A quick format does not erase data, but does clean out the fat tables. If that happens, you will have to extract the data manually. Try the cfdisk trick first. Then, experiment with some of the myriad Windows tools. Remember to make a full image of the partition in question and the partition table before trying these changes so you can go back to square 1 if need be. > If you are lucky you may be able to read the old data on the newly > created partition without needing to use a recovery tool (I was able to > do that with a linux partition once—can't remember if it was reiserfs > or ext3), but I would copy all the files somewhere safe in any case > because even very minor corruption could come back to haunt you later > (as many theologians never tire of reminding us). -- Robert Persson > > Conspiracy Bears: > Once upon a time there were lots of conspiracy bears... -- Peter -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
