Hacking Harddrive Lost its Partitioning

[JC-Gamer]

UPDATE: I used the software Ontrack Recovery recommended to me by a guy on WiiHacks (I was going to try your software, gunner007 if it didn't work out), and was able to retrieve everything. I also bought a 5TB hardrive so I can always have a back-up handy should this happen again.

Hello, I've been running games from my harddrive on vWii using USB Loader GX for six months now. However, my brother needed to borrow my harddrive to back-up his computer. I completely forgot to unhide my harddrive with UStealth before giving it to him and something happened. I'm presuming he got high and then clicked "Format" without realising it. After he clicked "Format", I presume he cancelled it which is why my harddrive appears as "Unallocated" in the screenshot below. Since it wasn't completely formatted, is there any way of recovering my data? I tried EaseUS''s software, but it recovered 180 gB in garbage files. After a quick check online, it turns out it will only recover typical file formats like pictures, .doc files, and mp4s.

Any ideas? Any hope? Or do I have to reformat and start from Step 1 again? That's 6 years worth of files that was on there...

 

[Deleted User]

http://www.file-recovery.com/

Works for me, it's not free though. If it's unable to find any partitions or non-garbage files, everything might be lost. Would of been best for him to let the format complete rather than bomb out of it half-way.

 

[xdarkmario]

Well on a unrelated issue I once lost all partitions on my hdd and I used easeUS partition master to recover the partitions. But I'm not sure it will work on foreign partition like wbfs

 

[JC-Gamer]

UPDATE: I used the software Ontrack Recovery recommended to me by a guy on WiiHacks (I was going to try your software, gunner007 if it didn't work out), and was able to retrieve everything. I also bought a 5TB hardrive so I can always have a back-up handy should this happen again.

 

[FaTaL_ErRoR]

Glad to hear it worked. Might want to make sure all recovered data is same size as before. More times than not during a format and then a recovery some of the data becomes overwritten. Thus you'll have what appears to be all your files but some parts are missing or filled in with whatever format process was done.
If he clicked out of the format process just after format deleted the partition scheme you should be good to go. But if it began overwriting the drive some retrieved files may not be complete. Just throwing that out there.

 

[JC-Gamer]

Well, so far everything I've tested seems to be working. I'll keep an eye out for bugs, though.

 

[75mak]

I almost formatted my drive after I forgot I had used ustealth on it.

What probably happened was your brother went to check why the drive wasn't appearing in windows and from there. storage manager in windows it was there but had not been initialised. So he probably just initialized it - that's what left it as 'unallocated'

 

[Cyan]

Unallocated means either there's no partition table, or there's a table but no defined partition.
First thing to do it try Ustealth switching, maybe it's only the signature which Windows doesn't find and think the drive doesn't have partitions.

if the boot sector (MBR, partition table) has been re-created and is blank if means only the partition definition are missing. but the partition and the data are still on the drive.
Using a partition restorer like listed above is the solution. it's probably scanning the drive to find partition start and length and re-create the partition table.


Maybe UStealth or Signature switcher homebrew should make a backup of the MBR sector for easy restoration

 

[JC-Gamer]

Maybe UStealth or Signature switcher homebrew should make a backup of the MBR sector for easy restoration

Good point, maybe they should do this. To be fair though, I haven't seen too many people have thus happen (I didn't find any when googling it),so maybe there's no need for it.

 

[Cyan]

There's no need for it until someone needs it.
it's not hard to make and will save the drive content, even if it's a single user who need it every 2 years.

when users started editing their MBR, I worked on a switcher for USBLoaderGX but never completed it. It had a lot of checks and dump to prevent errors. (dump MBR, edit, check, if new MBR is bad auto-restore, etc)
I don't know if it's still a needed feature, a homebrew is already doing it now.