External HDD - Unformat

To anyone that can help or give me any information would be greatly appreciated....

I lent my HDD to my nephew who has a Xbox 360 to play movies off it....for whatever reason it wasn't being able to read it and a popup question that read "Configure it" which my nephew thought it would need to be configured to play the movies.....of course
what resulted was my HDD being formatted for Xbox 360.

My HDD contained a lot of other infomation other than movies so I am desperate to get it back...is there a way to undo this and restore all my old data?

Again hopefully somebody may have some detail information. If you don't know then please dont post any comments like try this....I would rather only take advice from people that actually know at least then I may have some chance before I take it into the computer
shop to see if they can recover anything.

Thanks

:)

 

Unformat external hard drive

Hi Blowy,

from the above comment I am not sure we made this clear. Below is an except from windows info on formatting:

Reformatting a disk deletes all of the data on the disk

...reformatting [is done] at the expense of deleting everything on the [hard drive]. You would then have to reinstall...by using the original installation files or discs, and then restore all of your personal files, such as documents, music, and
pictures, from backups that you had made beforehand.

Recovery is not possible

 

4gb Slim--HD unformatted after failed update

My partner has a 360s with a 4gb memory unit that continues to unformat itself after updates. Hers doesn't have an HDD compartment like mine does-- does her memory unit need to be replaced?

 

Hi there, it's a bit of a tricky question because yes it's possible to retrieve data after a format as generally when a 'quick format' has been done it's just partition the data. I don't believe the Xbox would have done a quick format though and I have a
feeling it would have erased all data/software in order to put it's own on there so it's compatible.

Though the only way to get data after a format is by using a program on the PC like file scavenger so you might need to look into it further, there's certainly nothing you can do through the Xbox console to get the data back.