Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!wugate!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!tektronix!sequent!ccssrv!perry
From: perry@ccssrv.UUCP (Perry Hutchison)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Accidental formatting of hard disk
Message-ID: <793@ccssrv.UUCP>
Date: 3 Nov 89 02:56:26 GMT
References: <2968@hydra.gatech.EDU>
Reply-To: perry@ccssrv.UUCP (Perry Hutchison)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Control-C Software, Inc., Beaverton, OR
Lines: 26

In article <2968@hydra.gatech.EDU> gb7@prism.gatech.EDU (Joe Bradley) writes:

> Someone just stepped into my office and asked me if it was possible to
> recover from an accidental reformatting of an internal hard disk under
> DOS ...

As I recall, the first package to advertise this ability _without having
installed the package before the reformat happened_ was the Mace Utilities
(Paul Mace Software, in Ashland, OR).  Norton Utilities Advanced Edition
may also have that capability by now -- I don't have the manual handy and
don't recall for sure.

I've never had occasion to attempt this with any package, so cannot make a
specific recommendation.

I don't think you will need to know the DOS version, but if you do it can
usually be found in the boot sector.  (At least that will tell you what
version formatted the drive.)

Once the machine is back in service, do them a favor and rename their
format.com to something crazy like fmt@@@.com and create a format.bat
consisting of something like

    fmt@@@ a:

so this doesn't happen again.