Hi Jim, > They hadn't paid attentions to the messages telling them they were > about to format their hard drive, or they didn't realize what "format" > meant, or they sort of assumed FreeDOS would somehow be smart enough > _not_ to wipe their Windows partition. They wanted to know what I was > going to do to get their data back.
That is strange. FreeDOS 1.0 should NOT suggest to format an already FAT formatted partition again! It has checks for that... And if the partition is NTFS, it will not be visible for DOS, so you would have to use FDISK to shoot yourself in the foot in THAT content. That said, I think nobody should ever use DOS FDISK unless he learned how to use it as a teenager in MS DOS times ;-). About getting data back: Depending on how fast you find out what happened and depending on whether you used quick safe format or rather quick doomsday format or even surface wipe format, you can try our elegant "FORMAT c: /z:unformat" to get some data back. But be WARNED that an unformat can easily make things worse if you do it at another time than very short after an accidental format. Short meaning "you have not written much to the disk after format" here. Eric PS: A more frequent problem is to get the multi boot menu wrong and end up with an unbootable but still installed Windows. That can easily be fixed with a Windows boot cd or boot diskette. If you HAVE a boot diskette! Make sure to have one, as Windows XP often only comes with a disk which triggers deletion of all data and a full reinstall: You have to explicitly MAKE a REAL boot diskette yourself. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
