Partition ans data loss

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Hi,

Tried to Partition 100gb of a 1TB external hard drive, it was in osx Extended (journaled) and I partitioned 100 to Ms Dos FAT, but it seems to have deleted everything on the drive.
Does anyone know a way to recover this? or am I gonna have to use Data Rescue??

Thanks in advance
 
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Partitioning usually means losing everything on the drive. You may have missed the warning that it was about to erase everything. I don't know of any way to recover from it, but you might give Data Rescue a go. Nothing to lose at this point. But I suspect that anything that was overwritten by the FAT partition is gone forever. No way to know until you try.
 
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Partitioning usually means losing everything on the drive. You may have missed the warning that it was about to erase everything. I don't know of any way to recover from it, but you might give Data Rescue a go. Nothing to lose at this point. But I suspect that anything that was overwritten by the FAT partition is gone forever. No way to know until you try.

Ok, thanks for the response. Hopefully data rescue can retrieve something at least.
 

Raz0rEdge

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If you took a drive that had a single partition and wanted to ADD another partition, you've basically changed to contain 2 partitions and then when you format the newly created partition, you are definitely losing some data. If a drive has a single partition that DOES NOT take up the entire drive, you can add a second partition with the free space and format it how you want.
 
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If you took a drive that had a single partition and wanted to ADD another partition, you've basically changed to contain 2 partitions and then when you format the newly created partition, you are definitely losing some data. If a drive has a single partition that DOES NOT take up the entire drive, you can add a second partition with the free space and format it how you want.

Basically I tried to make a separate partition on that drive, I've done it before years ago, so I would have one part 100gb separate in Windows format. I saw the window come up saying it was erasing I pressed cancel but it literally flashed up for a second and was gone, so have no idea how it could delete everything (500gb) so quickly, I've done hard drive wipes before that take hours.
 
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It didn't have to delete the data, but it did delete the old partition and directory data, which effectively deleted the files. And when you made part of it FAT, that directory overwrote whatever was there, not only losing the directory data, but actually wiping it out. You might be able to recover files that were in the original partition that were not written into what you made into the FAT partition, but it's a crapshoot on what you can actually recover. It is worth trying, but don't get your hopes up too high.
 

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