Thread

This one really is ridiculous… follow me if you can.

Was trying to burn some disks for my “new” ibook when I started using TransMac - a program for burning DMG and mac disks. When attempting to wipe my CD-RW for this burn I clicked “Format disk for Mac” thinking it meant CD’s, then wasnt really paying attention…

All of a sudden my torrents vanish and icons start dropping out of my pc. It has formatted my 2nd HDD which is basically EVERYTHING except for bloody Windows, which is the ONE thing I wouldnt have lost any sleep over!

Now I have a formatted 500gig HDD with music, photos, invoices, accounts, employee details, every bloody thing I need (and of course not been backed up in a while - except for all my CI projects thank god), and its gone.

Its currently half way to being in Mac format, and empty. I cant check if its fully formatted for macs as I dont have a mac i can plug it into, only a ibook… As its not NFTS or FAT most recovery tools are screwed as they dont even see it. Its not even showing in My Computer, but it is showing in my Device Manager…

Anyone have any freakin ideas what I can do? I really cant afford £250+ to get it recovered by a recovery service, I am meant to be moving out this month and havent got a penny to spare!

try Linux portable like ubuntu, knopix etc, or find a tool to change the format to the harddrive

Thanks to everyone that added me on MSN to try and get this one working. Got some help eventually from a friend on the PNphpBB team who after about an hour on a lagged VNC connection managed to recover pretty much the lot of it!

I have lost all my music and my hurrendous amount of ripped television, but these are things I can easily get back. For all of you using TransMac in the future… WATCH THE HELL OUT! “Format Disk for Mac” doesnt mean CD’s… even if this is a bloody CD burning tool 😉

For future reference, the Mac Disk Utility works fine for burning disks images. Or, if you’re on a PC, just use a network connection or firewire to transfer files. It’ll take maybe an hour and save you this kind of CD burning nonsense.

The thought of burning my Mac disks on my Mac had crossed my mind, but for that to happen my Mac would have needed a CD Burner. With no way to burn CD’s on the iBook I of course need to burn them on my PC, a Windows program that handles .dmg files? Why not!

I am now going the other route and converting my .dmg’s to .iso’s using PowerISO. That’ll work a bit better I hope.