Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!umd5!purdue!decwrl!decvax!tektronix!reed!percival!bucket!leonard
From: leonard@bucket.UUCP (Leonard Erickson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Hard Disk Format Recovery (How?)
Message-ID: <861@bucket.UUCP>
Date: 22 Apr 88 03:04:00 GMT
References: <5442@sigi.Colorado.EDU>
Reply-To: leonard@bucket.UUCP (Leonard Erickson)
Distribution: na
Organization: Rick's Home Grown Unix; Portland, OR
Lines: 23

In article <5442@sigi.Colorado.EDU> murillo@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Rodrigo Murillo) writes:
<A friend has done the unthinkable... she formatted her entire hard disk.
<I am familiar with the Norton Utility-type programs that allow format
<recovery, IF AND ONLY IF you store the original FAT data prior to
<the format.  Well, the question is this:  is there any way to recover
<from a total format if the FAT has not been backed up?  Any help
<will be appreciated.  Thanks.

Buy the Mace Utilities package. It can recover quite a bit even if you
haven't backed things up. You will lose all the files in the root directory,
and may have a lot of trouble with any badly fragmented files. But it will
restore the subdirectory entries and from there you just need a *lot* of
patience.

To avoid this in the future, I suggest renaming FORMAT and creating a
FORMT.BAT file that calls it. Then you just check the parameters and
give an error message if they try to format the wrong drive! This works
well in our company...

-- 
Leonard Erickson		...!tektronix!reed!percival!bucket!leonard
CIS: [70465,203]
"I used to be a hacker. Now I'm a 'microcomputer specialist'.
You know... I'd rather be a hacker."