Hello everyone, I was refered here by kingroach in the xbox mod community.

Here's the problem:

I accidentally formatted my daily use drive (programs, picture, docs) using the linux based program XBOXHDM. The program formatted and partitioned the drive to the xbox file structure. I screwed up doing this to my "real" drive instead of a new drive i had.

Question:

Now that the drive is FATX partitioned and i've lost my data. What can i do to recover the data? Can i even use a data recovery program if it's fatx file structure?

Any help on this would be appreciated.
One note, option #5 of xboxhdm is to remove the fatx file system....would this help at all?

if your asking "can I get the data back from a drive I have re-partitioned and re-formatted" then the answer is.... no. you're fscked.

you _could_ try:

$ dd if=/dev/hda of=/path/to/bigger/drive/disk.img

then look at the file disk.img to see if any of your data is in there. But that's really only useful if you happened to have a few very very important text files that might have survived the drive hosing.

There are programs(software) out there that will recover a lot of files from repartitoned and reformatted hard drives. Recover My Files is one of them. Their web site is www.recovermyfiles.com
If you do a google search for "partition recovery software" or "file recovery software" and add freeware to it you will find a few programs that are free.
I have used Recover My Files on a xbox hard drive and recovered files (none were system files), even after repartitioning and reformating the drive a couple of times. You will have to remove the fatx partitions in order to recover any old files though. If the program doesn't see anything without it being partitioned, you might have to repartition it, just don't reformat it.
The program will take a long time to run through the drive if it was very big. I had one program run for 26 hours , only to have the computer freeze be cause I got impatiant .
I was using an old 500mhz amd k6 192MB ram....slow .
The trick is run more than one pass and look for only 4 to 5 file types per pass.
If you're lucky you'll find a lot of your important files.

Put the drive in a computer as a slave drive, best done under windows 2k or xp if that is what you had on the drive as an OS. "Recovering an NTFS drive from XBOXHDM FATX format"

Sorry to ask a question from a question, but how did you format your sata [1.5] HDD to "FATX"? I have a 200GB Fujitsu Mobile 2.5" MHY2200BH

The HDD can be found on the ccl website where is was bought from.

I'm attempting to use the 200GB to replace my 60GB HDD, but i can not format it as FATX, in order for the Xbox 360 to see the HDD.

Also i want to transfer my content from the 60GB on to the new 200GB, but for that i think i can use the transfer kit endorsed by Microsoft, the only main hurdle i have is getting the 200GB to be recognised in the Xbox 360, hence i need help!