boot camp gone bad

[chopstick2000]

so i recently upgraded to leopard, and decided to make a small windows partition on my macbook pro so i could play some games for windows on my mac. i had used the program a few times in beta without any hitches, so i didn't expect any this time...

well, long story short, i installed windows just fine and everything was dandy, until i tried to restart into my mac partition by holding down the option button as i turned the computer on... and Windows was the only choice. this is when i started freaking out. i booted back into windows and checked My Computer, and C:\ is 111GB rather than the 15GB it was supposed to be. so, somehow my entire mac partition is gone, along with all my data.

i've been searching for a data recovery program, but i'm having trouble finding a program that can actually find anything. i have some important files that were on my mac that i don't have backed up (i know, i know, i really shouldn't have tried boot camp without making sure everything was backed up - but there's nothing i can do about that now).

any help of any sort would be -greatly- appreciated.

and happy thanksgiving, if youre in the states (or somewhere else).

 

[TBi]

Sounds like you let windows format the whole hard drive instead of just the bootcamp partition. Don't know how to get your data back though.

 

[splashtech]

I would be extemely surprised if there is any program out there capable of doing this, although I would imagine that it could technically be done. If the files are important enough, consider finding a pro data recovery firm to have a bash.

 

[TBi]

I would be extemely surprised if there is any program out there capable of doing this, although I would imagine that it could technically be done. If the files are important enough, consider finding a pro data recovery firm to have a bash.

There are tonnes of programs to do this for windows based partitions/data. I have seen or never used one for a mac. But they are out there.

 

[monty77]

...as Mac was the 1st parition on the disk, and Windows now resides there, it's likely the Windows OS will have already overwritten the bulk of the data that was there

Data recovery software is generally only any good at recovering deleted data from a physical location on the disk that has not been written to since.

Adam

 

[TBi]

...as Mac was the 1st parition on the disk, and Windows now resides there, it's likely the Windows OS will have already overwritten the bulk of the data that was there

If he's lucky it will only have over written the OSX install itself. However it takes a lot to actually make windows format more than the partition it supposed to format so he might have done a lot more damage that he thought.