Accidently converted Fat32 External media drive to NTFS

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Ph0Xy

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Like the title said, i accidently converted my external HDD which was in fat32 to NTFS with PartitionMagic.

It took less than 1minute, and it was a 1TB harddrive, so I'm pretty sure no data was changed, only the one of the header sectors. So yea no I have an EMPTY ntfs drive here and i need to recover it.

I know theres a bazilion programs that can RECOVER files, but i don't want to scan the whooolee 1tb drive and recover and rewrite it all to another drive and all that trouble. I was hoping to find a way to just convert it back to fat32 and set the right header and just get my old drive back.

Thanks in advance
~PH0X
 
Well unless Im mistaken, the only way to switch back to NTFS is to reformat the drive - which still doesn't get your data back. I hope I am wrong.
 
Hmm, it was FAT32, I switched to NTFS, I wanna switch back to FAT32

If i switched to NTFS is 30sec without touching the data (just the mdr), there has to be a way to just undo the lil MDR edit and go back to the old infrastructure?
 
You lost your data when you formatted the drive. 30 seconds or 30 minutes you formatted a drive, which includes deleting all information on it and changing the drive data format to NTFS instead of FAT32. You can switch back to FAT32 if you want, but that will not bring back your data. You can't just 'switch back and forth' without losing the data on that drive. That is the whole idea behind the format.
 
He didnt format the drive, he changed the file type. The hard drive heads write to different types of blocks, or "sectors". FAT32 and NTFS are very different.
 
You shouldn't have lost any data if you switched from FAT32 to NTFS (unless Partition Magic formatted the drive, unlike Windows' native ability to convert Fat32 to NTFS without losing data). Plus...why would you want FAt32??? It's a less secure disk format, and you can't have files 4GB+ on it.
 
Well I was thinking, Carnage, that since the OP would have to format to get the disk back to FAT32, that would inherantly lose the data at that point. Maybe I'm way off here. Plus, the reason he said for "switching" to NTFS was an accident ;)
 
Well I was thinking, Carnage, that since the OP would have to format to get the disk back to NTFS, that would inherantly lose the data at that point. Maybe I'm way off here.
That is where I was going with it. I know you can recover data off of a drive, like oldskool i was thinking it was formatted.
 
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