I have some troubles that I hope someone can provide an answer for.

I was trying to work on my friends comp (Wind XP). He has two drives (1--100GB, 2--150GB).

I put 1 logical drive 12GB on the first drive and reinstalled XP on it. Deleted existing logical drive on the rest of the 1st drive.

The second drive was initially Fat32. I believe I converted it to NTFS wth partition magic, before the reinstall. I did not check to see if it was working after the reinstall, but XP labeled it as the C: drive. hda1 was the d: drive.

I was putting some network drivers on the XP. And HP distributes them in a self-extracting .exe which puts them on the C drive. Well, the big 150GB logical drive from the second drive (hdb1) was put as the C drive. They would not copy to the C: drive because it was not "formatted." Without thinking this completely through I formatted it (I selected with compression also).

Now the C: drive has some other Windows files that it puts on there "recycler" directory "system format" directory.

I ran a ubuntu live disk and tried to mount hdb and hdb1, as either ntfs or vfat, but it wouldn't mount as either.

I ran 2 small demo recovery utilities(restorer2000, active uneraser) which just found the files that are presently there, thanks to Windows.


Now I am running GetBackData--it is scanning the hdb and finding a lot less files that should be there.

Do you have any other suggestions on how to get back his data? Will some of the data be corrupted? Will names / directory structure be intact? Should I use a recovery service?

Thanks in advance

I haven't been to the board in a few months--sorry if this is in the wrong section. If you want to direct me to another board, either, that would be help. Thanks again!