Formatted an NTFS partition to Mac extended Journaled by mistake

disk-formatdisk-utilityhard drivepartition

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

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?

Best Answer

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.

Related Solutions

Restore partition type to NTFS

ExFAT is not the same as NTFS, it is however cross-compatible with Mac (10.6.5+), Linux and Windows (may require additional drivers/software).

It seems as you have unintentionally formatted your NTFS-partition to an ExFAT partition, and depending on which version of OS X you're running your Mac can only read from that file system and not write. (Unless you have additional software installed to handle that file system)

You can try and reformat the partition in Terminal in case the Disk Utility is being silly, you will lose all files from that partition (they're technically not gone, but you'll need third-party software to restore them).

To format the partition open up the Terminal App and run:

sudo diskutil list

Find the partition that matches your USB-partition you wish to format. It should looks something likes this (This is from my own harddrive). Find the correct identifier for the ExFAT partition.

Now run the following in the Terminal:

sudo diskutil eraseVolume {FileSystem} {Name} /dev/diskN

Replace {FileSystem} with HFS+ or similar (only natively supported on Mac, not Windows/Linux) and {Name} with a name for the partition. Replace /dev/diskN with the identifier for your ExFAT-partition. Make sure you type the right identifier, if you type in the wrong one you could easily wipe your Mac's internal harddrive.

Now the partition should be reformatted, unless any errors occured. Now you can open up Disk Utility and choose to format the partition as NTFS if you don't want to stick with HFS+.

This might not be the most effective way to do it, I'm no expert so anyone with better knowledge feel free to come up with a more effective solution

Windows – How Do I Recover Formatted Mac hfs+ Partition

The easiest way (depending on your model) is to do an Internet Recovery. You can do this by holding Command+Option+R while your computer boots. You will get a globe and will either ask you to connect to Wifi or if you are connected to ethernet you will just see a progress bar. After it downloads it will bring you to the recovery partition and you can re-partition your HDD and such.

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