Hey D.J.
 

Hey D.J. : Thanks. I consider this recovery to be nothing short of a miracle ! Man ! I accidentally formatted this External NTFS drive *TWICE* before I realized I was formatting the wrong freaking drive !! To be able to get everything back full is amazing to me. I frankly didn't think I would have any success after the failure of the nineteenth software. After all, how could all those software's be wrong ? The data must be gone forever - right ? Wrong ! There it was hiding on my external USB 2.0 drive all along ! This has been a very sad story with a very good ending. :-)

Hey Mark,

Good to read that you recovered your data files. Whew ! Did you ever try GetDataBackFAT or GetDataBackNTFS? Those worked quite well for me in the past. I will try the software that worked for you. In general, I keep my files on two different computers in two different locations, but I back up one computer to larger hard drives at the end of every year. This is a long time, but this method keeps me covered. Unfortunately, all drives are in one box in my house, Gotta fix that. Also Nanoflash shoots are 80 GB/hour with parallel recording on SDHC. That will change things.

Yeah, it's easy to make a mistake. I never do this when tired or distracted, and write down the reorganization process on a piece of paper. For drive copies, I disconnect all drives not involved in the process. If ever making permanent changes to a drive, such as recovering a corrupted partition table, clone the drive bit-by-bit with Norton Ghost and work on the copy.

Other lessons learned the hard way is that all RAID controllers are not equal. I was biased for nVidia nForce chipsets as I was an audio DSP engineer on those parts for many years. As it turns out, Promise or Intel offer the best with error correction on the SATA commands. nVidia has a FIFO command clear issue when emerging from Sleep mode, and Silicon Image does not have the error correction.

The Only Recovery Software that Works
 

Hi Gints:
GetBackData NTFS was actually the first software I tried, but it recovered the files corrupted and unreadable ! ZAR 8.4 (Zero Assumption Recovery) was the only recovery app which could retrieve the data in question in a readable form. This was even more remarkable since I managed to accidentally format the drive *Twice.* I thought I was Formatting drive C, when I was in fact formatting drive E ! The experts claim any drive formatted in NTFS can be recovered all the way back from 2 to 5 formats ago ! I'm sure there are even more efficient data recovery applications and methods used by professional data recovery labs. (Like those associated with Government and Law Enforcement). I understand the professional recovery labs will even disassemble a hard drive and work on the platters individually. I'm glad i didn't have to go that far, since professional recovery was the next step I was prepared to take.

Nothing like advice that actually *works*.

I've been away - I got back from Florida yesterday evening.
I've used ZAR to recover data from hard drives, a cousins and my own.
I also formatted a flash card from my camera and then realized I
hadn't copied the pictures to my desktop machine yet.
It brought them all back.

The recovery programs out there are really amazing. My daughter recently accidently erased a SD card of important photos and found a recovery program that would let you demo it to see if it could recover the files before you paid for it. You were able to preview what it recovered and if it was what you wanted you paid around $25 and it would complete the recovery. I don't recall the name of the program but I think this thread is great as it lets folks know there are inexpensive recovery solutions out there for data.

You should be a Hollywood script writer. Even "A Very Sad Story" has a happy ending. :)

If Hamlet were written today, it would never make it out of the slush pile...

Anyway, congratulations!