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Mistakenly formatted NTFS drive to FAT. How to recover?

sivasunken
Go to solution Solved by Fleetscut,

If you actually wrote a new file system to the partition then you are SOL. You would need a professional recovery service, and they would only be able to recover so much. But if all you did was change the partition table you could theoretically try to change it back to what the old scheme was. But you would need to have as much info as possible, like the starting block location and block size. You could also try to look for a tool that would look at various blocks and try to piece together which ones were part of the same file. But i think this might not work on drives that were too fragmented.

Hi,

 

 

While trying to install Gentoo Linux, I had mistakenly formatted a drive from NTFS to FAT using mkfs .fat -F 32 /dev/sda2 command. Does anyone know how to recover from this? Or do I need to use some sort of recovery software?

 

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do you need to recover the data or just reformat the drive?

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I need to recover the data with the folder structure though they are not critical. All my games and Cloud sync was on that drive and i am not looking forward to redownloading everything.

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If you actually wrote a new file system to the partition then you are SOL. You would need a professional recovery service, and they would only be able to recover so much. But if all you did was change the partition table you could theoretically try to change it back to what the old scheme was. But you would need to have as much info as possible, like the starting block location and block size. You could also try to look for a tool that would look at various blocks and try to piece together which ones were part of the same file. But i think this might not work on drives that were too fragmented.

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