I Lost Everything: Mourning a Reformatted Drive
 

I was having problems with my video card. I took my computer into the shop. While it was in, I was going to have them reformat one of the hard drives. My brother, many years ago, decided to go ahead and reformat our 200 GB hard drive for Ubuntu Linux. Well he's got his own laptop now, and I figured an extra 200 GB of space was nothing to pass up. They told me that it would be free to reformat the drive.

I got what I paid for.

An hour ago I picked up my computer and brought it home. I hooked everything up, as excited as can be... but it wouldn't boot up into windows.

Imagining a small problem, I quickly entered the BIOS and had it boot from a different drive. My backup windows XP drive.

The other hard drive was gone. My main drive had been reformatted, and the Linux remained.

I have lost everything. All of my super nintendo ROMS, all my videos, my bookmarks, my pictures, the music I made for the numerous small-time RPGs I made with RPG Maker. Elder Scrolls IV, F.E.A.R., Hellgate London, World of Warcraft, Unreal Tournament III, Diablo II, Starcraft, Call of Duty 4, Bioshock... its all gone... all of it, and there is no way to recover. I've lost everything I've worked all my years on. My ever-growing collection of short stories, poems, papers, and debates, my lists of phone numbers from friends new and old.

I know that, in time, I will recover. My computer shall rise anew, greater than ever before... but for now... I sit alone, in the default 800x600 hideously giant visual settings, with speakers that won't work, and tears upon my shirt, for I feel that I have lost my closest and most beloved friend.

Farewell, my data. Farewell.

PS. I don't think Computer Re-store can count on any continued buisness from me.

not that I let them
 

Ironically, I have a similar issue. I finally decided to reformat today (the computer stopped connecting to the network, which, in itself, was completely fine), though the files have been locked away for weeks because I attempted to merely re-install windows without reformatting. First reformat in the 6 years I've had this computer.
So, my sympathy. :/

You just brought some regretful memories about my old computer. You have my consolations.

!!

Setheris if you have not done so already, before you do anything further with that drive I would strongly suggest looking into the range of data recovery options that are available. Unless for some reason the shop did a full overwrite of the drive, a substantial portion of your data should be recoverable, save whatever was overwritten by the new OS. It is important at this time that you do NOT save anything new to the drive as doing so will result in you permanently losing additional data.

EDIT:

Adding to the above, with this sort of material you should with some additional effort stand a particularly good chance of recovering usable information.

Fifthfiend to the rescue, whoo!

I know how you feel - I've done this a couple of times when I was younger. Needless to say, everyone else is looking into buying me my own computer.

Nope. It's been completely wiped. It is blank. Completely blank.

I'll say one thing about that place... they are THOROUGH.

I highly suggest this: http://www.adrc.com/ .

I personally use this software. If there is ANY data left on that drive, this will find it. To actually recover all of it, there is a $6 fee for the full package, but that's damn cheap for such a powerful piece of software, which is incredibly small, all in comparison to the competition. I'm very happy I found it.


See, what a format generally does is it marks space as "empty" or "formatted." Generally, the data is left behind. This looks at the raw binary to find those files. Unless they went through the inane trouble of wiping everything to zeroes, you should be able to use this to get your data back.

Man, that sucks. I backup most of my creative stuff, but there have been times where I've irrevocably lost things. Games, music, all that I don't care about if I can just re-download or re-install...

But stories, NWN modules, god damn, those take hours or days or weeks or years of work and they're just not in existence anymore. Do yourself a favor and try every option these guys above me provide you with...

I'd cry too. :p

Yeah, reformatting a drive isn't too hard and you should have just done it yourself. I went through a similar thing - Regular backups now are crucial, either to data-DVD or flash drives, because let's face it stories and poems are text files and if you go to CGS you get free one-gig flash sticks that are rubber wrist bands. Free. Flash memory is dirt cheap these days.

Other than retroactive 'well I woulda done this' all I can say is, bummer, dude, I went through similar creative-fiction loss years ago. My condolences.