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I was creating a bootable Mojave usb for a friend on my Mac and by mistake instead of formatting the USB drive I formatted an NTFS partition on an internal disk to macOS Extended (Journaled). The format did not complete though and ended with an error but the damage was done and the partition is just greyed out in the Disk Utility and is not visible in the Finder. The disk in question is a GPT 1TB drive which has a Windows 10 partition of ~225GB, one that Windows makes itself during installation, while the rest was the data partition which got wiped. I haven't touched the partition in any way except running testdisk analysis on the drive.

This is the output from the testdisk analysis

enter image description here

The selected partition is the Windows 10 partition I think. I cannot find the ~700-750GB partition in this list. I don't have linux installed on this system although I had 2 images of backed up Ubuntu on this partition.

Can you guys please help me in figuring out what the safest way to recover this partition is?

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  • there are disk repair utilities all over the place that require anything from clicking a mouse to having memorized the internals of all major disk partitions. It depends on how valuable the data is. Personally I'd remove the drive and send it off for recovery. That can be expensive. But again it depends on how valuable your time is, how much the data is worth and how soon you need it.
    – Steve Chambers
    Nov 5, 2018 at 18:51
  • ^^Note that if you reformatted the drive, your file table is gone. You can likely recover many of the files with a tool like photorec, but the file names and folder structure will be lost, leaving you with a gigantic mess to sort through.
    – Wowfunhappy
    Nov 5, 2018 at 18:54
  • How old is your backup? Restore that and move on.
    – Marc Wilson
    Nov 6, 2018 at 16:37
  • Yeah I have found nearly 500GB of data using EaseUS Data Recovery and even the folder and file structure has been maintained perfectly. I'll buy a license in a couple of days and restore that data
    – m.umar
    Nov 7, 2018 at 4:26

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The best software for this problem in my opinion has been EaseUS Data Recovery. It almost even maintained the folder and file structure as before. I think this was because macOS did not successfully complete the reformatting of the partition and gave an error, anybody looking at this in the future, your mileage may vary. In my case ~200GB of data is a mess while ~500GB has been preserved.

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