have i just wiped my hard disc?

without thinking ive put the wrong harddrive into my new machine and installed openelec
has this now formatted my disc?

just to add ive now got it plugged back into my windows machine but cant access the drive, and checking with disc manager its been partitioned into two
one at 179MB and the other 931GB

Afraid so! Think you are in trouble, no way back I think as you have both formatted and written over the disk.

(2012-05-24 01:00)bossanova808 Wrote:  Afraid so! Think you are in trouble, no way back I think as you have both formatted and written over the disk.

great looks like ive lost everything for the second time in less than a year, i could fkin cry.

You MIGHT be able to recover some files with some recovery tools if you haven't written anything over the space yet. You've certainly lost most things, but if there's something particularly important, it's worth a shot. The general principle is if you want to try to recover anything, DO NOT use the disk for anything until you're done trying to recover.

na cant be arsed mate tried recovery tools before and there just not that good

bricktop: I certainly feel for you - it sucks to lose data. Even if it's not irreplaceable (wedding photo's), it's still a huge pain and a time sink to recover (dvd rips).
Once you've formatted the drive with a different partition table and file-system type - it's extremely unlikely you'll be able to recover anything off of it.
On the positive side, events like this will probably push you towards some sort of backup system. Even something as simple as a external drive that syncs your important files will dramatically increase your ability to weather disasters like this.
I use three levels of backup protection:
1. All my movies/tv shows/misc stuff that is replaceable is stored on Unraid. This protects me from single disk failure. This does not protect me from a fire, a burglary of my home, or accidentally deletion (like has happened to you).
2. All of my important stuff gets daily/weekly/monthly rotating backups onto an external hard drive, done using rsnapshot. Protects from accidental deletion (but still not fire, burglary).
3. All of my irreplaceable stuff gets sync'd remotely to an online storage service, in addition to being in my rsnapshot backups. Protects from burglary, fire, etc.

People tend not to set up backups due to the cost and the hassle. Truth is, backing up is way less expensive than losing important data. I spent $99 on an external hard drive, and probably 10 hours configuring rsnapshot correctly - in retrospect it's one of the best investments I've ever made.

thanks teaguecl i will be looking at using something like unraid in the near future

(2012-05-24 01:25)bricktop Wrote:  na cant be arsed mate tried recovery tools before and there just not that good

I recommend trying Active Boot Disk (Win Edition) from here -> http://www.ntfs.com/boot-disk.htm

I recently used it at work and it recovered 5gb of Outlook .PST files from a drive that was formatted and reimaged over.

I think the trial download is just time based and not feature based.

5gb sounds good mach how big was the original file mate?

The user had 5 Outlook archive PST files (about 1GB each) that he stored his old emails in. We were unaware of this when his computer crashed. We then formatted and reimaged his workstation with Windows 7 on a single partition. His old install had 2 partitions (C/D). We then configured his account and setup Outlook on the new install and that's when he asked about all his old emails.

I figured he was out of luck since we had formatted and reloaded over his drive with a different partition structure.

I booted the system with the Active Boot Disk flash drive and ran a full recovery scan on the hard drive and it found all 5 of his PST files and restored them. 2 of them had some corrupted parts and lost about 20 emails each.

All I can say is Active Boot Disk is the best recovery tool I've used.