# Accidental format of External USB Drive



## Colart (Apr 15, 2007)

Hi 

My XP based PC crashed a couple of days ago and I decided to reformat the hd and rebuild from scratch... after rebooting with my old XP Pro CD I elected to remove the partitions on the hard drive and assign new drive quota's... Impatiently I clicked OK to proceed... to my horror I realised that my external USB disk was still attached to the system and was curtly being reformatted... AAARGH!!

With ninja like speed I unplugged the USB Drive... fortunately I had removed it before the actual physical reformatting process had got to it. The bad news was the drive was unreadable because the Master Boot Record had been over written. After doing a bit of research on this site I found a neat little open source utility called TestDisk: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk.

Here are the steps I followed to recover the situation:

1) Download the Test Disk utility

2) Connected the USB Drive to my laptop. (windows kindly offered to reformat the drive as the previous operation had failed... I obviously decilned 

3) Ran the TestDisk program and select Analyse disk... takes about 15minutes

4) The analysis results indicated the data was intact but the MBR (aka Master Boot Record) had been deleted.

The TestDisk message went something like "the extrapolated boot record does not match the current boot record"

5) Selected "Rebuild MBR"

6) Selected "Write Boot"

7) Selected "list" (which lists files and folders) 

8) Hey Presto!! Files and folders were listed! 

The drive is now fixed and data recovered...

Hope this helps anyone with the same problem.

Thanks a million!! I couldnt have done it without this site!!


----------

