Restore External harddrive accidental format/Test Disk-Write access is not available

I accidentally formated my 1TB WD external hard drive to exFAT and lost everything. I ment to format my USB flash drive and clicked on the wrong one, I made a huge mistake. I know the partition is still there because disk drill and test disk both found it and can be recovered. However, I dont want to pay $89 for disk drill unless I have to. So, I downloaded test disk and followed step by step directions. My computer is not rooted. Here is the problem; since my computer is not rooted it tells me to use the sudo command which I do. Once I select the lost partition it tells me "Write access is not available." Heres what it says in test disk:

TestDisk 6.13, Data Recovery Utility, November 2011
Christophe GRENIER <[email protected]>
Main Page - CGSecurity

Disk /dev/rdisk1 - 1000 GB / 931 GiB (RO)

Write access for this media is not available.
TestDisk won't be able to modify it.

- No partition from this disk must be mounted:
Open the Disk Utility (In Finder -> Application -> Utility folder)
and press Unmount button for each volume from this disk
- This media may be physically write-protected, check the jumpers.





>[ Continue ] Continue even if write access isn't available
[ Quit ] Return to disk selection


I went into disk utility and unmounted the only one that was mounted and still no luck. How do I fix this, so I can recover my lost partition and restore my external hard drive?? Please help!!

Thanks

The TestDisk documentation does not say it can recover an exFAT partition. Maybe I'm not reading it correctly but it says it can undelete files from exFAT and find lost exFAT partitions and even fix a bad partition table. However, it doesn't say anything about being able to recover it. Are you sure it can do that?

If you accidentally formatted that 1 TB WD drive to exFAT and it was formerly formatted to NTFS, FAT-32, or even HFS+, the data that was there may have been overwritten and can't be recovered by normal means.

chscag said:

The TestDisk documentation does not say it can recover an exFAT partition. Maybe I'm not reading it correctly but it says it can undelete files from exFAT and find lost exFAT partitions and even fix a bad partition table. However, it doesn't say anything about being able to recover it. Are you sure it can do that?

If you accidentally formatted that 1 TB WD drive to exFAT and it was formerly formatted to NTFS, FAT-32, or even HFS+, the data that was there may have been overwritten and can't be recovered by normal means.

Click to expand...

I'm not positive but I know the partition is still there since it finds it in both programs. I'm pretty sure that it will be able to get my files back as long as I can get past this step. I know that if it was set to a stronger erase mode in the format it would never be able to be found but since it wasn't its still there somewhere. Just need to figure out how to make it not write protected...

no one can help?