Well! It's sure been a long time since I did anything THIS monumentally fucking stupid:
I formatted the wrong 1TB drive. Instead of formatting the one I just plugged in with a USB adapter, I formatted the one I have Windows installed on.
Worst-case, I don't think I've lost anything vital. Had my latest resume and all the rest of my job paperwork on there, but fortunately I've got that spread out all over various IMAP servers, multiple drives, multiple computers -- you get the idea. I'm looking for a damn job, so I have resumes strewn about everywhere.
And I had my password file on there, but fortunately I'd just finished backing it up to multiple drives and my phone.
So nothing vital. It's just that it took me hours to get the damn thing set up. And it had a Mass Effect save on it that was maybe one mission farther along than my backup.
Fucking irksome, at the very least.
It was just a quick format so the data should still be on there -- just the MBR and whatever other basic stuff overwritten. Might be able to get it back with some partition recovery software. If I can find a good program then it's worth it to try just because I don't want to redo the whole Win7/Win8 installation/configuration thing, reinstall all my programs, replay that lost hour or whatever of ME2...
Fuck. One of those "Well, obviously I should have gone to bed five minutes ago and now I will be going to bed much, much later instead" moments.
I tried the trial version of
EaseUS since I'm currently booted to OSX. I was under the impression that trial versions of $90 software were supposed to make you think hey, this software is totally worth $90, but the makers of EaseUS seem to think trial software is supposed to peg two of my 4 CPU's and completely fucking lock up.
TestDisk for Linux looks promising.