Expert: Gregory Donner - 8/29/2006

Question
Hello Greg,

I recently dug out a few spare hard drives as I needed to fix an A1200 that's still in daily use as an interactive 'movie jigsaw' at the hands-on centre where I work (part of Waikato Museum, Hamilton, NZ).

Anyway I plugged in one drive (Apple-branded IBM drive, 700Mb 2.5") and the A1200 didn't boot, so I stuck in the Install 3.1 floppy, and on reaching the workbench there were no drive icons.

I rather foolishly ran the HDSetup program (thinking the drive was in Mac format). I clicked past the usual 'Are you sure you want to lose all your data?!' message. Then, briefly, my life flashed before my eyes... more accurately, for about a second, the two volume icons appeared on the workbench along with a handful of left-out appicons...

I realised to my horror that this was the drive I used in my daily machine about six years back. I would love to be able to recover the data. Since the partitioning was a quick operation, my guess is that all the data is still there but there is nothing to 'point' to it? I can't remember the partition sizes.

Is there a program to scan through all the drive blocks for some shreds of files etc.?

Thanks for any help you can give. I promise I'll call in here often... I have an expanded A1200 that I use occasionally. It's the type with no case, spread out over the desk, Mediator PCI/Voodoo3, Blizzard1260, etc. :)

Cheers,
-Alex

Answer
Hi Alex,

I'm not sure just how much is salvageable from a partial format, but you can try the following two programs from Aminet:

http://www.aminet.net/package.php?package=disk/salv/DiskSalv11_32.lha

http://www.aminet.net/package.php?package=disk/salv/UnDelete.lzh

Between these two, if the data is recoverable, these will do it (especially DiskSalv).

I hope this helps!

Greg