have i just wiped my hard disc?

Im running that software Mach and York say it's not looking too bad
I can see the partition and the files so I'm guessing that's a good thing.

Problem I've got is the drive is in an unrecognized format linux i guess so I'm saving as a raw disc image to another hard drive which is taking ages and I've realized the image I'm trying to save is bigger than the space on the drive so not sure what's going to happen when the space runs out.

Could I reformat the drive into ntfs and recover the partition or is reformating going to make things worse.

SRy for bad spelling I'm trying to write this on my phone

Reformatting will definitely make things worse. Each time you format a disk, it wipes everything. If you can see the old partition and file structure, that's definitely a good thing. As long as you don't write anything to the disk, there's a pretty good chance you can recover some files.

Hard to give advise without being familiar with that particular software, but most will let you copy just the recovered files, just gotta find the option. It's probably unrecognized because it's been formatted to whatever OpenElec uses (ext3/4?), so the files stored in ntfs format don't match the ext4 file table on the disk.

bricktop,

I've never used Active Boot Disk to recover files from a Linux partition, so I'm not sure. If it can't read the files after running a scan from the File Recovery app due to the partition being linux, then disc image may be the only option which does take a very long time.

ok thanks for the help,
im going to need a new hdd to try recover this stuff so is going to take a little while, being able to see the deleted files makes me believe that i might be able to get a decent amount of this stuff back.

ill post back with the results when im done.

got over 90% of my stuff back, got to admit i was very surprised, i even formatted the disc back to ntfs

must have taken about 4 hours to scan the drive and then left it over night creating the raw files looked like it was going to take at least another 4 hours.

but well happy with that

thank you

That's good news. Hopefully you don't make that mistake again!

Nice to hear. That's a good return on a drive that was formatted over.

Hello Mach170,

I have accidentally deleted several of my .pst files, and the free download software is not working - maybe because my files are over 5GB. I was looking at the software you are recommending, and I see there is also Active UnDelete and Active Recovery. Do you think one of those would work - I don't think I really need the full Active Boot Disk - but I could be wrong. Thanks for your help - I am looking at losing 2 years worth of email archives that I use daily!!!

Update - I just tried the active Recover from the same company, and it does not find my file chris.pst. How would I know if this file has been partitioned - not exactly sure what that means - and would the file name remain the same?

I tried openelec and decided to go with windows version instead, now i cant see the hard drive in windows, how can i fix this so I can reload windows.. any help appreciated..