Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

benabrown

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 15, 2008
3
0
I hope this is the right forum for this; I wasn't entirely sure where it fit best.

Anyway, I had a SATA volume formatted as HFS which I swapped from mac to PC. It's been running in there happily for a good length of time, and I've been using macdrive to access it with no problems.

However, I recently upgraded my Motherboard, and Vista requires a clean install when you do so. During re-installation (and at other times), the OS always sees the HFS volume as being completely empty (I've reinstalled before and it does so). This time, I accidentally selected my HFS volume rather than my NTFS volume for the install; however, I immediately realized my mistake and cancelled. The installer did not format the HFS volume in terms of erasing any data (it saw no need, since it could see 450+ gig of what it believed to be free space), but it did copy 121 meg of files before I cancelled, part of which I believe to be the MBR.

The volume now believes itself to be NTFS. When I open macdrive to have a poke around, it displays a 465GB NTFS partition, but also a 465GB 'unknown' partition.

I'm really at a loss as to how I might go about accessing the 200+ gig I had on this HFS volume, since I'm 99.9% sure that nothing was erased during my mistake; just that an MBR was written ready for installation of vista.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be really grateful. Thanks!

EDIT: In case it helps, the drive now shows the following files:
$WINDOWS.~LS (Folder, 0 Bytes)
c6ce1f5c7d4dfde73466685c8e6a43 (Folder, 54Kb)
Program Files (Folder, 2,86Mb)
BOOTSECT.BAK (8Kb)
 

benabrown

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 15, 2008
3
0
Never mind, solved the problem with disk recovery software. For anyone else experiencing anything similar, I'd like to advocate R-Studio, it did exactly what I needed it to do.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.