Hi. Ive done a really stupid thing and installed Mac OS X Minimal Protégé on a storage external drive that has a great many Photographs on it thinking would still be available but to my horror its turned the hole drive into a boot drive.
Is the drive retrievable ? please any help would be greatly appreciated.

Protege was a flash memory device with a FireWire connector.

The minimal install of Protogo is likely to have overwritten at least part of the data on the drive. You could try the Data Recovery tool in TechTool Pro, which works best if the volume on the external drive had the Protection feature in TechTool Pro active on it, and you had the feature configured to save the Protection file to another volume. Use of the feature is described in the manual, available under the Help menu in the TechTool Pro application.

I am sorry to see that you made this mistake. The program does warn you that the contents of the entire drive or device will be erased when you create a Protogo device. Aside from the Data rRcovery tool, the only option I see is the services of a data recovery firm, such as DriveSavers, which can be costly. If you decide to do that, please send a message to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. before proceeding.

Thank you for your prompt reply ill give the Data recovery tool a try. I feel so stupid having done this.

You are welcome.

For future reference (not to make you feel worse now), this impolitely-titled, perhaps slightly dated, but still useful overview. It is my impression that few people have a backup strategy that would survive a reading of this:

11 Stupid Backup Strategies