5punk

Well bugger me sideways. I've managed to recover most of my photos, including ones from my graduation! Even got quite a lot of documents back too, although it would appear to mostly be useless/old ones rather than the ones I'd have liked, but hey ho.

That GDB tool is the computing equivilent of witchcraft. I have no idea how it recovers stuff from a reformat, but I'm damn gald it did! Cheers guys.

Formatting is the same as deleting stuff* - it doesn't overwrite anything, just makes a note that nothing is there any more.



*Apart from low level formatting (can you even still do that?) and formatting to different file systems (still doesn't overwrite, but does fuck stuff up)

Dr. kitteny berk wrote:Formatting is the same as deleting stuff* - it doesn't overwrite anything, just makes a note that nothing is there any more.



*Apart from low level formatting (can you even still do that?) and formatting to different file systems (still doesn't overwrite, but does fuck stuff up)

This-ish - it depends on your MFT being at least somewhat intact, though, I believe. And there's some magic too. Glad to hear it mostly worked out in this case.

(Low-level format is obviously still possible, but almost never advisable. Basically if you get a power cut etc. at the wrong time during a repartition/full format, you might need a low-level format, but that's about the only time I can think of when you might need one).

AFAIK, low level format went out a long time ago with upgrades to IDE electronics and a low level format -if managed- can actually ruin a drive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_formatting

cheeseandham wrote:AFAIK, low level format went out a long time ago with upgrades to IDE electronics and a low level format -if managed- can actually ruin a drive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_formatting

The last time I had to low-level format a hard drive was in the year 2000 I believe. A friend of mine (seriously) was formatting a hard disk in his heavily-overclocked Abit BP6/dual celery machine, and it went pthunk part-way through. The drive then refused to be formatted in the normal way. Fortunately another friend's mobo (don't remember the model, but it was a BX-based board) had a low-level format utility in the BIOS, after which the disk worked fine.

eion wrote:
The last time I had to low-level format a hard drive was in the year 2000 I believe.

Yup, 7 years would qualify as "a long time ago" in my book
IMHO that was a lucky fix though (note I'm not saying it wasn't a good one!) and caught in the last generation of available low-level formattedness.

I had an Abit BP6 too, ahh what a great mobo that was...

cheeseandham wrote:I had an Abit BP6 too, ahh what a great mobo that was...

This. It was such a great board that I actually bought my friend's one off of him.

I may have attempted this drunk, and i may of switched my hard drives around with the PC still on.
Also, i may be posting this from a laptop. LOL

cashy wrote:I may have attempted this drunk, and i may of switched my hard drives around with the PC still on.
Also, i may be posting this from a laptop. LOL

You sir, deserve a medal