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I once formatted my external ntfs drive to reiserfs, and was nonetheless able to recover every single file with minimal dataloss (some dataloss or corruption is possible, unfortunately). I've never tried it with fat32, but you could try looking up some data recovery programs in google and trying them. Good luck with it.
First off, haha it serves you right! Pay attention to what you're doing next time!
Second, your average format won't erase any real data, it just erases the part that knows where all the files are on disk so it looks empty. It will be possible to recover your files, if the partition was using the entire device then just create a new partition with fdisk that uses all the available space on the drive and try to mount that. If that dosn't work then you're up shits creek but don't worry about that unless you need to.
If you mean after formatting: yes, because the data is not lost. It's just a bit harder to access.
If you mean as an idea : lossless compression (zip, flac, etc) leads to dataloss that is 100% recoverable. ;-)
Strange, I never knew that you could recover lost data...
Technically you can't. The catch is most times when you "format" a drive you aren't deleting any of the data, you're just deleting the partition table which outlines the partition boundaries on the disk etc. Once you've done that, all your data is still there, just you can't see it and therefore it's recoverable.
If you do something like this to format the drive:
Code:
cat /dev/urandom > /dev/hda
then the data isn't coming back, that stuff is gone forever.
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