Help! Friend Formatted my 500GB Backup Drive

[DJpowerHaus]

I went away for vacation and had a friend cat sit for me. He wanted to watch a movie on my xbox 360 which has a 500GB USB drive attached to it full of movies. He managed to "Configure Drive to use with Xbox" which, best I can tell, deletes the partition table.

 

I have hooked the USB HDD up to my PC at work and all I have is a 16GB partition and no files. I'm hoping to recover some of the 500GB of movies, music, photos, and backup files. Help me try to get this stuff back.

[leesfer]

You can try a recovery program like Recuva

 

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

[ghinckley68]

If it wrote a new partion table(which it did this also wipes out the MFT and the Bitmap of the drive) to the drive it is probably not going to be easy to recover. It would be quicker to just redownload it unless it has something you can not replace. Besides 500g of movies how many of those do your really watch. I have 130g of music and if i lost it all i would only re download maby 10 if it.

 

Just a thought.

[button]

http://www.runtime.org/

get data back.

not cheap, but easy, and works.

I use this at work once in a while.

[Zone]

I don't want to say its impossible, but it writes a new partition and from my experience with data recovery once you partition a drive all the data is gone.

Also, the app button provided might not function properly because the way the drive is partitioned. The 360 creates a exfat partition.

Edited July 1, 2012 by Zone

[jszucs]

There might be a slim posiblity to recover stuff, depending on what was done in the "setup" But for the time and cost and or both, unless there is something you had on it noone else has I would just start over.

 

Also leason learned if this was truly your "back up" drive treat it as souch. If it's just a "storage" drive to store and access files on... maybe consider a true backup drive this go around?

[riceboyler]

http://www.runtime.org/

get data back.

not cheap, but easy, and works.

I use this at work once in a while.

 

If it's really that important, this is the way to go. Unfortunately, if it reformatted the drive (and overwrote the contents of your MFT, you're left with having to pay professionals to get it back.

 

Might I highly recommend Carbonite or JungleDisk?

 

Oh, and smack your friend upside the head. He deserves it!

Edited July 2, 2012 by riceboyler

[jszucs]

I did a little checking and your screwed if the X box formated the drive. It's not a format like you think of formating a hard drive. The xbox format breaks the usable space up into "blocks" so it's writen over everything.

 

Pros can more then likely still get it back but it will be major money.

[riceboyler]

I did a little checking and your screwed if the X box formated the drive. It's not a format like you think of formating a hard drive. The xbox format breaks the usable space up into "blocks" so it's writen over everything. Pros can more then likely still get it back but it will be major money.

 

Ooooh, that's right. XBOX doesn't use NTFS or any standard file system. Sorry man, that sucks!

[1989STAR-ESIR]

If you were near by I would hook you up with my 2TB movie collection. That sucks about the cat sitter. Hope you did not pay them much. Guess if the cat or cats are ok you are lucky in that.