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

basilt

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 15, 2016
105
8
hello,

Tonight while trying to install ELcap on my 1.1 (2.1) mp... I selected one HDD which was bootable with win 7 ultimate formated NTFS used to flash my card.

HDD was mainly Win7 with only 1 folder with drivers and I THINK another folder with some very important video files, which i cannot track anywhere.

When booted with OSX installer, i forgot and Formated the NTFS hdd as OSX Journaled, and now i realised i need to try recovery...

I used DW for a start and it can only rebuild the hdd, as it recoginses the OSX Journal structure, i guess.

How to recover the NTFS part as normal ? Any ideas ? I cannot reformat it as NTFS from disk utility only FAT32 or exFAT and not sure if recovery can go worst with these modes.

Any ideas or solutions to my problem ?

thanks
 

AidenShaw

macrumors P6
Feb 8, 2003
18,667
4,677
The Peninsula
hello,

Tonight while trying to install ELcap on my 1.1 (2.1) mp... I selected one HDD which was bootable with win 7 ultimate formated NTFS used to flash my card.

HDD was mainly Win7 with only 1 folder with drivers and I THINK another folder with some very important video files, which i cannot track anywhere.

When booted with OSX installer, i forgot and Formated the NTFS hdd as OSX Journaled, and now i realised i need to try recovery...

I used DW for a start and it can only rebuild the hdd, as it recoginses the OSX Journal structure, i guess.

How to recover the NTFS part as normal ? Any ideas ? I cannot reformat it as NTFS from disk utility only FAT32 or exFAT and not sure if recovery can go worst with these modes.

Any ideas or solutions to my problem ?

thanks
Don't do anything more to write to the drive. Nothing.

You've wiped out the NTFS filesystem and much of the metadata. More to the point, you've overwritten portions of the NTFS filesystem with HFS metadata.

Some utilities (for example http://www.easeus.com/data-recovery-software/ ) will do a block-by-block scan of the entire hard drive, and find "orphaned" data. This ignores the actual filesystem, and looks for blocks that appear to be directories and file records - and can recover them. If it finds a "file record", the file record is a complete description of the file, its metadata, and data extents - and it can recover that file if the data extents have not been overwritten.

Reformatting with different filesystems destroys more and more of the metadata, and reduces the chance of finding complete files with their metadata intact.

Best advice, though, is to restore from your backups and give up on the drive.

And, although it's too late for you, it's generally accepted that physically or logically disconnecting all drives except for the OS drive being updated is a good idea.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Synchro3

basilt

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 15, 2016
105
8
thanks for your help, this software did not help as well. so i leave it as is. regards.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.