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fezono · Jul 8, 2007, 08:24 PM

Yesterday I tried to installed Leopard beta by restoring a disk image to my external drive.

I have a 500gb eternal HHD and so I created a new 30gb drive partition out of the 500gb FAT 32 space, the Leopard installation went smoothly and everything worked..... and then I plugged the Eternal HDD back to a PC and none of my partition didn't show up.

so I thought it was weird and then put it back to my macbook.... and then..... I REALIZED THAT OSX turned my original partition to HFS!!!!!!!!!!![/b](mac osx extended journaled)...... God and Everything inside the partition is GONE! ... is there anything I can save the data back???? I had 350gb of personal stuff including 10 years of pictures and files in the partition I really can't loss those data.... I may just kill myself if really lose everything... please help me and I appreciate so much of your help!!!!

THANK YOU VERY MUCHHHHHHHH!!!!love you too tones!

Cold Warrior · Jul 8, 2007, 08:29 PM

You might take a look at some file recovery utilities to search for deleted/erased files. Maybe something cheap will do it. Otherwise, you might have to spring for a commercial utility.

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powerbooks · Jul 8, 2007, 08:51 PM

That's what I called reckless behavior. Whenever you partition a hard drive, you will almost for sure risk erasing the original partition and losing data. Any reasonable partition program would warn you before proceeding. What program did you use to "create" a new partition? It sounds like that you did not know what you were doing. There are some "magic" programs which may create a new partition out of the old ones. Even so, it is ALWAYS a huge risk. You may call your software company for help.

Taylor C · Jul 8, 2007, 11:35 PM

It doesn't sound like you were very knowledgeable about what you were doing, no offense. I'd try some of the data recovery utilities listed above, but if the drive was partitioned and formatted, your stuff is more than likely gone. Just as a note, the Disk Utility on Leopard's installation disk does in fact support non-destructive partitioning much like BootCamp uses. However, partitioning anything is still a risk.

OreoCookie · Jul 8, 2007, 11:57 PM

(1) Don't touch the drive.
(2) Restore from your backup. (Yes, if you had backed up your important data, very little would have been lost at this point.)
(3) If there is no backup, try DataRescue. That's probably the best non-destructive data analysis tool for the Mac. Do not use DiskWarrior in this case!
(4) If the above have failed, you have to determine how much your data is worth to you and then decide whether you want to use a professional recovery service. It'll be expensive, mind you, but perhaps worth it.

For the future: make sure to read the warnings that repartitioning will delete your data. There
And: think of a backup strategy!

Tomchu · Jul 9, 2007, 01:46 AM

PEBKAC

It's not OS X's fault ... you probably didn't read the warnings your partitioning utility gave you about being destructive. The tool actually needs to be intelligent and understand your filesystems in order to shrink them down non-destructively. With the proper tool, this is 100% safe -- I've been doing it for years.

It's a piece of cake to read a partition table, and then re-write it with some modifications.

Fortunately, as long as nothing has been touched in the area of the disk that your FAT32 partition's data resided, then an intelligent recovery utility may be able to read the old FAT and try to do some recovery. If the FAT is gone, then it's raw disk scanning + analysis, and that's a pain in the ass with 350 GB of data.