[rabinzx]

I was helping a friend deleting windows 7 on his bootcamp. She told me after that, merge the empty space back to Mac volume. The computer is Macbook in 2008~09, 160 toshiba hard drive, running leopard. While deleting, I notice the volume of location where win7 installed is kind of wired.

the bootcamp volume is located within Leopard's volume, and every time the computer restart, the "bootcamp" volume will show up on the desktop (even if I turned off SHOW hard disk on desktop in Finder).
And there is another small volume with bootcamp volume ( I remember it was 100mb)

First I checked bootcamp, and it didn't give me nothing, so I decided format the bootcamp volume along with the small volume.
Right after I delete the bootcamp volume, the system gives me error message. I thought it was because the small volume, so I delete the small one too. Then the two volume were combined.

next, I tried merge the empty volume into Mac's volume in Disk Utility, but system says "this partition canot be modified" so I have to restart see if it would let me merge after restart.
Just for the record, at this moment, the Mac system was perfectly fine.

After restart, screen says "error, cannot find system", so I tried Leopard installation CD, log into disk utility.
It shows ONLY one volume (the one I formated - bootcamp) under hard drive. And the size of it is 159gb out of 160gb.
I clearly remember the distribution before reboot was:
Hard Drive:
1. Mac - 99GB
2. Empty (bootcamp) - 60gb

Guess what? My friend just recall she had some important picture stuck in iPhoto.

Now, I am trying to recovery the volume by connecting the 2.5" notebook drive to my PC, but waiting for shipping of a 2.5/3.5 HDD adapter?

I know there is some command under Terminal that can fix some volume issues. But I dont know exactly what they are. Additional, I never used the "erase" function while formatting.

What should I do now? Can someone point me to the correct direction? What is the chance I recovering those pictures?

[Spheric Harlot]

To remove the boot camp partition from a Mac, open the Boot Camp Assistant in the utilities folder and click "Remove". That is all. That will merge the reclaimed space back into the Mac volume.

Is this on Lion 10.7? You say "Leopard", but the 100 MB partition sounds like the Lion recovery partition.

How exactly did you erase these?

What did you use to do so?

Do NOT use a PC to recover an erroneously formatted Mac drive.

[reader50]

Does s/he have a Time Machine backup? (You referred to the Mac owner using both genders) Or any kind of backup? This will be a heck of a lot easier to recover from backup than to do data recovery.

If there is no backup, then we need to know what OS and utilities you used, like Spheric said. If it was all done with Disk Utility, then the Mac volume at the start will still have a valid block offset. You can use Data Rescue to scan and recover files. This would be after you add the external drive, install OSX on it, and boot from the external.

First rule of data recovery: don't do anything further to the original drive. Leave it alone until you've recovered (or failed to recover) everything of value from it.

[Athens]

Testdisk is a good open source product I have used many times to recover deleted files on Windows. I have yet to try it on OS X.

TestDisk - CGSecurity

The data should still be recoverable since the data is physically still on the disk, as long as you don't over write it with saving new files on it.

[HDRG]

Originally Posted by Athens 

Testdisk is a good open source product I have used many times to recover deleted files on Windows. I have yet to try it on OS X.

TestDisk - CGSecurity

The data should still be recoverable since the data is physically still on the disk, as long as you don't over write it with saving new files on it.

This product actually works pretty well for this purpose. We've seen better, but as far as an open source thing goes, it's not bad.