You need to put the drive in another machine and run a recovery utility against it. Given the amount of free space, it's unlikely that the W7 installer got much further than formatting and making a few directories, so a decent data recovery tool should be able to scan the drive and reassemble most of what was on it.
I've used and had good results with Runtime Software's GetDataBack before. > -----Original Message----- > From: hardware-boun...@hardwaregroup.com [mailto:hardware- > boun...@hardwaregroup.com] On Behalf Of Bino Gopal > Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 11:54 PM > To: hardware@hardwaregroup.com > Subject: Re: [H] Need MAJOR help with fubar'ed WinXP install > > Mother of cr*p. So now that I'm facing reality, I think the Win7 USB > key > did more than I expected b/c when I'm in the recovery console and go to > C:\ > and type "dir" I see very few files and dirs and I also see > 99,756,855,296 > bytes free on a 100GB HD (which had a lot more data on it)... *SIGH* > > So I figure Win7 wiped the MBR or something right? It's also installed > and > written a bunch of dirs but no files b/c I assume that's what I > prevented > when I aborted the process at 1%... > > So I tried fixboot and copying over ntldr and ntdetect.com from WinXP > but I > am apparently trying to fix a Win7 install (since as mentioned there's > no > Doc Settings dir like in XP, but a Users dir, which I'm sure is Win7 > right?)... > > So don't I need to do something with some sort of repair program to try > and > figure this out (i.e. fixing the MBR and stuff) or is my data all lost > at > this point? Thoughts? >
