[bedoughty]

Long story short: I have an external 250 GB drive on which I had about 140 GB of ALL my backup files. The drive was accidentally erased, (but mostly not overwritten) and Panther was installed on it - but that's all I did with it. As soon as I realized this mistake I ejected the drive and now I'm trying to figure out a course of action.

I need to recover any and everything I can from the drive that was there before the wipe. Are there any *nix tools or freewares I can use for this? I'd like to avoid paying for recovery if possible. BTW: I'm running Tiger on an iMac G5.

[jdogg99]

There's a program called "Data Rescue," but it isn't free. I had to use it once when a similar thing happened, and it got the job done. I think you can demo it (but only retreive a limited number of files without paying). Check versiontracker.com

[wadesworld]

If you erased and installed Panther on it, you've hosed a *bunch* of your data.

As others have said, you can try Data Rescue. A better option would be to send it to someone like DriveSavers, but you're likely looking a lot of money to get it back.

Wade