I RTFM but didn't FTFM... HELP!

[nofx513]

I blew away my friend's HD by forgetting to pull ALL of the IDE cables off of his drives before running xboxhdm. (Let the insults begin

Does anyone know if there is any tools or methods to try and salvage any original data from his WinXP drive (original C: drive)? I tried booting from liveCD (BackTrack2, Winternals Disk Commander) but could not see anything that would allow me to browse the recently formatted drive.

Any help or suggestions appreciated...

 

[[Captain_America]]

If you've formatted a pc drive, you're pretty much screwed. IF you were to take it to a data recovery specialist, they MIGHT be able to get BITS and PIECES of stuff off of the hdd, but it wouldn't be very substantial, and it would COST ALOT.

I guess you just have to learn to FTFM the hard way =/
I once blew a PSU in a pc because I plugged a molex power cable into a hdd while the pc was on >.<

 

[WaferJ]

If you've only formatted the hard drive you can get the data back easily.

If however you have killed the drive by overwriting the firmware you'll need to reflash and then do a data recovery.

I've had loads of success with Get Data Back for NTFS. It's quite low-level so a formatted drive should be fine to recover

I believe you can download a demo and it will show you what COULD be recovered but you will have to buy the full version to do the actual recovery.

Good Luck :wink:

 

[nofx513]

Thanks for the responses, I tried various tools DiskCommander, HandyRecovery & PC Inspector but at best was only able to recover a few folders/files which where worthless, as well as a bunch of fragmented files that were just gibberish.

Of course the fact that XBOXHDMAKER writes data to the drive pretty much makes recovery impossible for mere mortals.

Thanks again for the help...