Windows 7: Entire hdd accidentially formatted

Recently I was trying to install Fedora on my laptop along with windows 7. I booted to the live cd and was deciding on what drive to intall it on.

So from the partition editor in fedora, I selected one of the logical partitions under the extended partition, and selected the format option.

......!! Guess what, my entire drive got wiped off!! In a jiffy..

I have a system repair disc and a backup which is quite old.... Right now all im left with is booting off the live cd in fedora.



Is there any way, any way at all that i can restore my hdd back???

Welcome to Seven Forums, AngryKratos.

You have formatted the Hard Drive. It would though not impossible, very difficult to resore the earlier Partitions. The easier way out would be to reinstall Windows.

If however you have only deleted the Partition but not reformatted the Drives then you mat try to learn at http://www.partition-recovery.com/. Although I have never tried it myself I think recovering a deleted Partition is an easier proposition.

You may of course wait for more knowledgeable inputs from other Forum members.

Well, well, well. Turns out that I did manage to bring my machine (frankly because it was just a quick format, and only the partition table would have been lost ) back to life!!

For anyone who might end up on this post, here's what I did...

0) I booted to fedora using the live cd. Had a working internet connection and a cd burner at my disposal, this is what i really like about the live cd's !

1) After doing a few searches I found a nifty boot up disc found here: Download Hiren
at this time version 15.1 is the latest...

2) Burned the image onto a cd and booted to it. I tried to repair the startup using the Windows 7 repair disc prior to this with no avail..

3) Selected to boot to the Mini XP. Note: there were many more options during the bootup screen, but i felt more comfortable using a GUI this time..

4) Started up the 'HSCBD Menu' program. And from the programs tab on the top,
selected Programs>>Recovery>>DiskGenius 3.2.....

5) Finally, it scanned my drive and found two lost partitions, and restored them by saving the partition to the disk!!!!!

This might not even be close to the right thing to do, but this is what occurred to me and it worked!!

Excellent job done, AngryKratos. I am sure I would have panicked if I were in your place. That is why I maintain back-up images and save all personal data on an external drive or on DVDs to be able to restore everything to its original state after a serious glitch.

Hey thanks for the link to the software, now im curious about it. although i have a bunch of hard drive docks and software to recover deleted partitions and data, this stuff is always fun to play with. you never know what may be useful and its always better having more than one recovery software.