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Overwrote NT with RedHat: Good Idea But Bad Move

From tonyray on Mon, 11 Oct 1999

Hi there answer guy,

Im tonyray form philippines, got a big problem.

I was installing a redhat 5.2 on my computer, with 1st hardrive ide-with nt4 normally working, 2nd hardrive for redhat5.2. What happened the nt4 hardrive was deleted reformatted into linux native. Is there a way to get back my nt4 files, like unformat?

please help thanks tonyray

Unformat would NOT help in this situation regardless of which OS or platform was involved. You didn't merely reformat your drive or delete those files. You've overwritten most or all of them.

The only reasonable way to get back your files is from a backup. I realize that you probably don't have one --- I've found that too many people walk the software installation and upgrade high wire with the safety net of a recent, tested backup of their data.

Sorry I can't offer you better news or more hope. If your data is worth quite a bit more than your computer you could look into data recovery using "magnetic force microscopy" (a technique used in criminal crime labs computer forensics).

Of course the procedure would probably cost more than my annual salary and probably only be partially successful. So that suggestion is not practical.

Copyright © 1999, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 48 December 1999

HTML transformation by Heather Stern of Starshine Technical Services, http://www.starshine.org/

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