Deleted Drive D by mistake !

castle96

Help please - when formatting a new drive/caddy/spare for back up, I managed by mistake to wipe clean/fomat the D drive on my HP (12 mths old). This is shown as D drive 'Factory_Image.
How do I restore what was in D ? (Computer still works fine)

macman

That was the manufacturer's built in back up partition that would have enabled you to do a 'factory restore' to as new condition in the event of your OS corrupting. The computer will work fine without it, but you've lost the safety of the back up.
HP might be able to sell you a recovery disk which will do the same thing, but these days most manufacturers just supply the back up on a 'D' partition.
However the 'D" drive is not a 2nd physical hard drive, it's just a partition of the main drive. So if your hard drive fails, you're stuffed whether you have a factory image or not.

BritRael

castle96 wrote: »

...I managed by mistake to wipe clean/fomat the D drive on my HP ...

Formatting does not actually 'wipe' the drive, just like 'deleting', does not actually delete files.

20 years ago, you would simply use the DOS command 'unformat' or 'undelete' and you'd be done. Not sure how you do it nowadays, but if you post what OS you're using maybe you'll get somebody to help. Failing that, try Googling 'unformat HDD' or something similar. You should then be able to find a good PC forum to get some advice, or maybe some free software to do it yourself.

At present, the only practical advice I can give is do not write to this drive. If all you have done is format, the data on the drive should still exist. However, if you write to it (install a program, save some files etc.) you will overwrite the data that you want to recover making it unrecoverable.

Laz123

If you haven't got an xp(?) disc if the os goes awol you won't be able to reload to factory settings to reload the os and you'll need to make a streamlined xp bootup disc. This will enable you to at least run a sfc to repair system files. http://ask-leo.com/i_dont_have_an_installation_cd_for_windows_xp_what_if_i_need_one.html

harry.zoop

I used a program called activeundelete. I got back most of what I had lost on a drive that lost its formatting. The only problem is if anything gets saved to the drive you want back information is being written to it and going over the top of what is there. Search google for activeundelete and I think you can get a trial version that will show you if anything can be recovered.