Formatted my Firestore too early....
 

I formatted it before I downloaded my footage! Is there any way to recover that? Bonehead move on my part.....

I don't think so.
 

I know this isn't what you want to hear, but...formatting destroys the directory (and I'm pretty sure the boundaries of all existing partitiions). While it's possible that some or maybe all of the footage may be there, i.e. the 1s and 0s that make up the digital values - and may be relatively intact, it could now be scattered among the addresses of the new partition(s). There would be no information in the directory for any software to know what address to go to to find the file footage. While it's possible the FBI, CIA or other high-tech/high-priced orgs may be able to salvage some of it, I think you're totally out of luck.

Simple analogy: your house address is currently number 5 main street, and that is where all your mail is delivered. If your town or county came along and renamed your street to oak street, and ran the house numbers in the opposite direction, you could then be number 255 oak street, but the postal service would be looking to deliver your mail to 5 main street, hence it would be undeliverable. The effect of reformatting is similar to the renaming of your street and the re-numbering of the houses.

When your Firststore is connected to your computer, it is just another disk drive.

Generally, when you format something you should consider it gone forever.

However, If you do not attempt to record anything else, some of the disk recovery software may be able to recover you data.

I must stress that the "Unformat" software requires that you do not write anything else to the disk!

I will search for some software. I do not know if it still exists.

I believe that the Firestore uses a Fat32 disk volume.

You can do a google search for unformat.

MS DOS 6.22 had an unformat command. But this will probably not help.

The following link for unformat software may help:

http://www.newfreedownloads.com/Wind...-Recovery.html

I will post some more, as I continue my search.

Here is another software tool:

http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm?source=google15

Remember, do not record anything on your firestore until you recover your data.

Please feel free to email me privately.

Use GetDataBack
 

I've used this program successfully on more than one occasion:

http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm

Dear Joel,

I have sent you a private email with my phone numbers.

Feel free to call me. I will be happy to assist with your problem.

HI Joel,

Try using R-Studio. It's saved my ass a few times. Your firestore will be read as an external drive, so it should work to recover whatever it can find on your drive. Did you do a regular or quick format (or is there an option for these things?).

Let us know what happens.

ron

No, your data is not gone unless you have overwritten it, used a hard drive shredder program, or performed something similar to a low-level format. Try some of the tools that people have suggested, but do not give up! Basically you want to rebuild the file allocation table by scanning through the disk raw data and looking for file signatures. There are many programs that can do this. In any case, you will probably need to get the hard drive out of the firestore and connect it to a computer. Unless you can get low level access through firewire port?