Recover external hard drive....

I've done a bad thing.

I reformatted by windows xp machine using the system recovery option to delete all personal files. I forgot to unplug my 500gb western digital external drive which is now showing 4gb used 4gb free and I've lost all the content, including all the photos and video of my kids.... Not Good!!! And I havent told my wife yet....

If anyone knows any way I can recover this data I would be eternally grateful

 

"is now showing 4gb used 4gb free"
That is just not right for them to do. They formatted your external HDD into an 8gb partition?
Anyway, try this: http://www.majorgeeks.com/Undelete_Plus_d5301.html
Make sure not to write any more information to the external HDD until you are done retrieving information, as any info written may over-write something you are trying to recover. Good luck!

 

Thanks for the link, unfortunately this has not worked, its really strange, I think I've lost all my files and to cap it all the total drive size is less than 1% of what it should be, its 4.58gb, freespace 4,29gb

this am it was a 500gb drive !?!

Any ideas on how I can recover my drive to its original size even if I can't retreive what was originally there?

 

You need to have it plugged in. Right-click on "My Computer" and click manage. When the computer management screen comes up, click on the "disk management" section to the left. At this point, you should see your external drive at the bottom middle (should say ~500GB) and the small partition to the right of that along with an unallocated to the right (or RAW). Now, the wording changes depending on your OS, but right click on the small partition you do not want and click delete volume/partition. If there is anything other than the small partition on that one strip, delete that too. Your entire hard drive should say something like unnalocated. At that point, you should be able to right click on it and select new volume/partition. Just follow the wizard after that.