Unpartitioned and formatted c: drive by accident! Now laptop is dead...Please help!!

Hi everybody, Hope you have all had a good christmas!


Might not be the besttime to be posting on here as it may not be busy on christmas day but thought Id give it a shot.

Right as the title says I have killed my laptop, I know how I have done this and it was completely stupid of me. I bought a new external USB HDD to backup my PS3, this needed formatting to FAT32. I tried to format it through windows with the command line, after 6 HOURS it got to 100%, only then did it decide to tell me that the HDD was too big to format to FAT32?? Sooo after a bit of research I downloaded FAT32 formatter to do it for me.

I got FAT32 formatter and hurriedly went on to it, it wouldnt let me format the harddrive as most of it was NTFS so I deleted the NTFS partition. The option to format the full drive to FAT32 then appeared. I thought great, ckicked format.....Which then brought up the blue screen of death, a load of writing quickly scrolled down the screen. Then my laptop turned off. When I turn it back on it says the following:

Broadcom UNDI PXE-2.1 v12.2.0
Copyright (C) 2000-2009 Broadcom Corporation
Copyright (C) 1997-2000 Intel Corporation
All rights reserved.
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting Broadcom PXE ROM.
No bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key.

I guess the simple answer would be to inser a boot disk, but I dont have one . The laptop I have is an Acer Aspire 5742, I only bought it a year ago and it has been fine until now. I do know quite a bit about computers, but just made a stupid (slightly drunk) mistake.

All I can think of is that as there is no format on the hard drive my laptop will not recognise it? Can i fix it? And more importantly can I get my Data back? I have a lot of photos from my last holiday that I really really do not want to lose.

I would very much appreciate any help. Let me know if you need to know anything else. Thanks and sorry for going on for so long.

Regards,
DT

 

Re: Unpartitioned and formatted c: drive by accident! Now laptop is dead...Please hel

PXE means your computer is trying to boot from a networked drive not the hd in the computer.
Detach the external hd, turn on the computer and go into the BIOS. Make sure it is set to boot from the installed hard drive.

 

Re: Unpartitioned and formatted c: drive by accident! Now laptop is dead...Please hel

It is set to boot from the internal hard drive, thats the one i formated by accident :-o.

Sorry if I didnt explain myself well. I formatted the C: drive by accident, now it wont boot up, I guess its because it cant find an OS?

Boot from network is 5th on the list in BIOS.

Is thereay way I can fix the internal hard drive? I have another laptop here so can plug it in to this one in a caddy if theres anything I can do to get my data back?

 

Re: Unpartitioned and formatted c: drive by accident! Now laptop is dead...Please hel

Are you saying the internal drive of your computer is the one you accidentally formatted?

 

Re: Unpartitioned and formatted c: drive by accident! Now laptop is dead...Please hel

Unplug the USB HDD and try booting up again. Sometimes a machine will try to boot from an attached USB drive before it will boot from the internal HDD.

If you did wipe out the partition and/or format the internal drive the data may still be retrievable IF you don't write ANYTHING to the drive. My best advice would be to take to a local computer shop and see if they can get anything back. Data recovery tools like RStudio and the like are very useful but can cause DATA LOSS if not used properly.

see this http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc938432.aspx for maximum FAT32 volume sizes. You may need to partition the external, IE 32GB FAT32 and the rest NTFS/EXT/Whatever filesystem of your choice. Be very careful doing this for obvious reasons. Good luck, let us know how it works out.

rgm

 

Re: Unpartitioned and formatted c: drive by accident! Now laptop is dead...Please hel

Sorry for my post in #4. I could have sworn the only other post was from plodr. Not sure what happened. Must of been sleeping.

If you decide not to use a shop to recover the data, there has been good results with PhotoRec but as BoatDiesel82 suggested, do not write anything to that drive.

 

Re: Unpartitioned and formatted c: drive by accident! Now laptop is dead...Please hel

Thanks everyone,

tgell I think my posts take a while to appear as I am a newish user so it probably wasnt there when you posted.

Right I am going to go and buy a caddy and try and recover the data myself. I have checked the prices of data recovery companies, seems they START at £150-£200!! Seems a bit expensive to me, its only really recent photos I want. I do back up every now and then, just havent done for a while.

So would you say just plug the dead internal HDD into this laptop that I am on and try to recover from here. Or would I be better putting a new HDD in me dead laptop the using the old one through a caddy and taking back bits that I want? If I do put a new HDD in it I think I could get it going again by downloading a recovery CD from Acer? I think???

I have actually managed to format the external HDD into FAT32 now, all 500gb, I just had to use some software for it, rather than go through windows. But now my old PS3 wont turn on for me to get my data off!!! That was the whole reason I bought the HDD and got myself into this mess, haha, cant believe it.

Thanks for all your help anyway.

 

Re: Unpartitioned and formatted c: drive by accident! Now laptop is dead...Please hel

I would put the bad drive in a USB adapter or caddy and attach it to your good laptop. Once you see if you can recover the files, you may be able to get it back to a factory state without using recovery disks. If you only formatted the C:\ drive and nothing else, you might be able to use the recovery partition on the drive if it is still available, otherwise you will need the recovery disks from Acer.

I would try Minitools Power Data recovery. It is easy to use and will recover up to 1GB free. If you need more than 1GB it requires purchase or you can try PhotoRec which is also good and open source. It has a little higher learning curve though. You have to make very sure you are selecting the correct drives as they are labeled differently in PhotoRec. And just a reminder, never save data back to the drive you are trying to recover from.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step

 

Re: Unpartitioned and formatted c: drive by accident! Now laptop is dead...Please hel

Hi tgell,

Firstly happy new year everybody!

Thanks for the advice, I ended up paying for Minitools and luckily have all of the data which I wanted back, thanks for that.

I still have a problem with the original internal hard drive from my laptop, the one which I formatted to FAT32. I have tried to format it back and it just does not work? I dont know why, I had tried to format it through DOS yesterday and it told me it could not format it, I then put it back in the laptop and booted from the windows 7 disk. It got to the point where it was creating a partition then it told me it could not create the partition?

Now I have the hard drive plugged in to this laptop through a caddy. It shows on 'My Computer' As Local Disk (H but does not show a file format or any capacity or space available? I have just tried to format it back to NTFS through DOS with the following command: format /FS:NTFS H: But it has started to verify the drive and has stayed at 0 percent, now for around half an hour?

Is there any other way I can format the drive?Or is it dead? Would I be better just buying a new HDD for the laptop and re installing Windows? I have a windows 7 install disk and product key, so can do this. Could do without buying another HDD though if possible. Thanks

 

Re: Unpartitioned and formatted c: drive by accident! Now laptop is dead...Please hel

Put the drive back into the laptop. Then download Gparted Live CD iso file (gparted-live-0.11.0-7.iso), burn the iso with Imgburn. Boot the CD. I would delete the partitions that are currently on the hard drive if any. Then create a new partition and format to NTFS.

GParted partitioning software - Full tutorial

 

Re: Unpartitioned and formatted c: drive by accident! Now laptop is dead...Please hel

If the machine has a readable Windows license all you need is a Windows disc to install. "Recovery" discs are generally full of junk/bloatware/outdated stuff so I never use them. Note that it must be an OEM Windows disc and the versions must match (IE Home Premium, Business, Ultimate etc) Drivers can be downloaded from another machine if the Acer (probably Realtek or Atheros) if Windows doesn't have the Ethernet card drivers.

As far as the drive not wanting to partition correctly, you need to zero out the superblock. That's the part of the disc that contains all of the partition table and filesystem data. Sometimes when the superblock gets corrupted traditional utilities don't know what to do and therefore cannot edit it. If the partition editor (GParted) on a Linux live CD doesn't work, let us know and I'll walk you through the process of zeroing it out with DD.

Happy new year!
rgm

 

Re: Unpartitioned and formatted c: drive by accident! Now laptop is dead...Please hel

Thanks for the help tgell and boatdiesel,

I burned Gpartition on to a cd and booted from this, to my surprise it showed one ntfs partition taking up the full drive. I deeted this and created a new one, which took up the full drive then I booted from the windows CD...

Then after about an hour of looking at the screen telling me Setup is staring I chose the install language etc. Then it must have taken another 20 minutes to scan the drive. I chose the only option I could.The install never got past 0%, after a while it came up with the following message:

Windows could not formata partition on disk 0. The error occured while preparing the partition selected for installation. Error code: 0x80070057

I dont know whats causing this? Should I have made the partition smaller, say 150gb and left some unallocated for the windows install?

Im gonna have to shoot off anyway and get to work, if you need to know anything else which may hep etme know and I can reply from work.

Thanks again for all the help.

 

Re: Unpartitioned and formatted c: drive by accident! Now laptop is dead...Please hel

If this is a Windows 7 install disk you can zero out the drive before you partition. I do not know why Windows 7 would try to format the drive again after already being formatted by Gparted.

Boot the install disk and select Command Prompt.

Then type the following and enter after each command.

Diskpart

List Disk

Select Disk # (In your case # should be 0 because you only have one drive)

Clean all (this will zero the drive and may take awhile)

When finished, you can then do an install and let Windows 7 partition and format the whole drive.

You can do the same thing (zero out the drive) in linux using the dd command.

I would have BoatDiesel82 confirm this but I believe this is the command to zero out the drive in linux.

Open a terminal and type the following command.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

sda being your hard drive. I am not sure of the command to find drive names using linux but when you ran Gparted, it would show the device name in the upper right drop down box.

 

Re: Unpartitioned and formatted c: drive by accident! Now laptop is dead...Please hel

Thanks tgell, Ill give it a try when i get home from work.

Strange isnt it? I didnt think it would have to format again, it didnt even get past 0% on the first section of the install 'copying windows files'.

I'll try it through command prompt on the windows disc first, never really used linux so I'm not really that confident with it. But if it doesnt work from the windows disc I'll definitely give it a try.

I really dont want to buy a new HDD if I can help it. They seem to have doubled in price since the thai floods and I could do with giving my bank balance a bit of time to recover after christmas!

I'm sure I'll get it sorted with everybodys help on here though I really appreciate it. Thank you


btw do you know how many posts I have to make until they dont have to be checked by the moderator? Or do I have to go through some kind of initiation ritual to become a fully fledged member?

 

Re: Unpartitioned and formatted c: drive by accident! Now laptop is dead...Please hel

Hi,

Linux looks at the disk slightly differently which is why it may be successful at formatting where Windows fails. It is just a quirk but often formatting in Linux first will then allow Windows to subsequently use the disk without errors. I believe you did not format using Gparted but just created the partition--perhaps formatting from gparted will solve the problem. You can still reformat again during the Windows install.

Diskpart should work as well, just something I noticed in the thread.

***
Main reason I posted was to say I think excessive punctuation will get new member's posts kicked to moderation. I think the "..." in the title of the thread may be causing all your posts to go to moderation. It shouldn't happen in subsequent threads.

 

Re: Unpartitioned and formatted c: drive by accident! Now laptop is dead.

Thanks Sach2,

Yep I think you are right, I did just get rid of the exisiting partitions then create a new ntfs partition in the drive. Ill have a look at it when I get back home and see if I can format the drive. I thought it would have the same effect to be honest, but I dont really know much about it!

Think I'll give the windows command line a try first.

Sorry if it gets a bit tedious explaining things to me everyone. hopefully Ill have it sorted soon.

***

Ah right, didnt realise, Ive got rid of the extra full stops now, hopefully this post will come straight through. Thanks.

 

Re: Unpartitioned and formatted c: drive by accident! Now laptop is dead...Please hel

Well, we got rid of the delay anyway!

To be honest I haven't used Gparted in a while. If you got to the point where you selected NTFS for the partition type then I think that does quick format the drive. Tgell, is more familiar with gparted then I am. It sounds like Diskpart is the way to go now.

 

Re: Less Punctuation

Interestingly, it looks like you will have to edit your title for each new post in this thread. You can shorten it to whatever you like since it only shows on the actual post and doesn't edit the original title.

 

HDD will not partition

Thanks Sach2, I am going to hacve to sdo that arent I? Ah well, at least its sorted and I can post.

Right, now on to my laptop. I did what tgell had suggested and cleaned the disk. Restarted it and loaded the windows install again (which loaded up in around 3 minutes this time, rather than an hour before?), then it came to the screen where I can choose a disk, it showed disk 0, showed the full capacity as unallocated which seeemed right to me. So I started the windows install, after 10 minutes, stuck at 0% I got the same error again, windows could not format a partition on disk 0.

After this I scoured the internet quickly for error code 0x80070057 on install and found some other ideas, thought id try the following in the command prompt in DISKPART

LIST DISK
SELECT DISK # (where # is the corresponding disk number that you want to install Windows onto from the list you just pulled up)
CLEAN
CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY
SELECT PARTITION 1
ACTIVE
FORMAT FS=NTFS
ASSIGN
EXIT
CD\
SETUP


This worked up to the point where I got to formatting the drive to NTFS. When I did this it got to 24% complete then told me the following:

diskpart has encountered an error; the parameter is incorrect. see the system event long for more information

I really dont know why? Could it be a bad sector on the hard drive or something. Any ideas what i can do next? Think I might try and zero out the drive in Linux using dd as both tgell and BoatDiesel have suggested.

BoatDiesel82 is the offer still open to walk me through that process? I would really appreciate it, or even if you could confirm the commands that tgell has mentioned are correct that would be a great help. (Please bear in mind that I have never really used Linux before, but am usually good at understanding things and more than willing to learn and give it a try.

Sorry for the long winded post, and thanks everyone!

 

Re: Unpartitioned and formatted c: drive by accident! Now laptop is dead...Please hel

I noticed you used the Clean command when you created the partition with Diskpart. Did you initially use the Clean All command?

 

HDD dead

Yes, I used CLEAN ALL the first time I used diskpart.

 

Re: Unpartitioned and formatted c: drive by accident! Now laptop is dead...Please hel

I would have sach2 confirm but I believe this is a hardware issue.

After partitioning and formatting in Gparted, did you get this screen during the Windows install. It should have shown one partition (disk 0 partition 1) instead unallocated space as shown in the image.You may want to try using Gparted again, delete partitions, create new and format to Ntfs and making sure that it shows as disk 0 partition 1 at the image below.



Just a note: You can also zero out the drive using a linux base bootable CD of Partition Wizard.

http://www.partitionwizard.com/partition-wizard-bootable-cd.html

http://www.partitionwizard.com/help/wipe-disk.html

I got the dd command syntax from Wiki. See Disk Wipe on the following link. Do not have any external drive connected when you do the dd command. I am almost positive your internal hard drive is sda but I do not know the command to check device names. I am sure when you start Gparted it will note your drive as sda.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)

 

Re: Unpartitioned and formatted c: drive by accident! Now laptop is dead...Please hel

I think there is a good possibility it is hardware but it seems odd that it started with a partitioning mistake.

Disk wipe looks like a good solution. If it can get through the whole HD then try Windows again.

One thought I had been thinking but which is the basically the same as disk wipe was let Gparted format to its default file type ext2? or whichever. See if that forces it to do a full format rather than a quick format. Or you could do the same in PW. What we are looking for is some partition program that will do a full rather than quick format of the HD. Should take at least 10 minutes rather than 2 or 3 minutes. Windows seems to fail at this so I would try both Gparted and PW to see if you can get one of them to succeed. Then go back and let Windows try again.

 

Re: Unpartitioned and formatted c: drive by accident! Now laptop is dead...Please hel

Hi everyone,

Just thought Id let you know I ended up buying a new HDD for my laptop.

At the end it wouldnt even format, through Gpart or PW. Then to finish it off I treid installing windows and got the message:

Can not install windows on this drive. This drive will fail soon.

Soo I went and bought a new HDD, installed windows and everyhting works fine now.

Just wanted to say thank you for all your help. I got my photos back, that was the most important thing. Bit late with my thanks, but better late than never!

Thanks you,
DT