I fucked up

[Bubba Grizz]

I did a clean format of my computers drive and reinstalled Windows 7 x64 Enterprise on it. All of that went well but where I fucked up is that I left my 1TB Maxtor drive connected while I did this. Now I can't access that drive. The drive shows up with a letter and has no unallocated space on it but when I try to open I get an Access Denied error. I went into the security properties and made my new user account the owner of the drive with full rights but still no go. I removed the drive and then rebooted and let the hardware wizard reinstall it when I plugged it in but no luck there either. I then moved it to my other computer and still the same. The first thing it says is that it wants me to format the drive.

I won't lose all that much on the drive as I only had my porn collection and a bunch of crap from previous computers but there are a lot of photos that I won't be able to replace. While recreating the porn collection would be fun it would really pain me to lose all those photos. Is there any hope or should I start thinking about formatting? Would Bart PE work on this?

[Winnow]

You'll be able to recover a lot off that drive, if not repair the partition completely.

I'll have to find the posts I made about recovering my partition stuff when I lost hundreds of thousands of images. I can't remember what recovery software I used but at the very least, you can recover the photos. They may not be named right, etc but it they are personal photos, at least you'll be able to get them back.

I'd start with partition recovery type software and if that doesn't work, break out the heavy duty stuff that goes sector by sector.


edit:

Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery is what I used to recover my infoz

http://www.stellarinfo.com/

[Bubba Grizz]

I got it all back. One little check box held me back. When I changed ownership of the drive I forgot to check the box to include all folders and subfolders. I just did that and now I have access to all the data.

After doing a bit of reading before I figured out my error and found GetDataBack. I downloaded their free version and it found all my file really rather quickly. The problem is that they wouldn't let you actually copy your data elsewhere unless you bought their $80 license. I was tempted because that is a tool I could use on my side jobs. I may yet buy something like that.

Thanks for the advice Winnow. I knew you'd have something for me.