Hi guys,
yesterday I formated one of the ntfs partitions of my hard drive with xfs because I wanted to use it with my Slack system. Unfortunately I did not backup one of the folders in the partition - an old project of mine. Now it's gone... What can I do to restore the data on that partition? What utilities can I use for that task?
Any help would be greatly apreciated!

You will need some kind of disk editor or sector editor. I had to do this almost 20 years ago with a DOS disk on a Novell 3.10 server (Lost a single hard disk head, person backing up was not doing it, correctly. Backing up was not my task, but I was willing to give the recovery a shot) You might also google computer forensics. The best thing would be use some sort of live CD. If your data was stored in a text file, it should be easy. If your data is compressed it is still do able, but a lot of work. If the data was encrypted, I am not sure you will be able to recover it even if you have the key.

In short, you are going to have to search the disk sector by sector for your data and put the file back together, piece by piece.

Good luck.

-JJ

In other words: Good Luck.

It's doable, but not easy. Your best shot is doing a Google search for "format data recovery"

Stop using the drive immediately, and as others have said, look for a forensic hard drive program.

Thanks guys. I appreciate your help!

If you manage to solve the problem, please post the way how you did it.

I could recover just part of my data. That's because I had used the partition before I realised my folder is missing. I'm not so much in Linux and I was also not in mood to experiment new utilities so I used Ontrack Easy Recovery in Windows.
Thanks for the help!!!