Cliffg

I am new to forum and would like to ask or some advice. I have an external 3TB hard drive that was formatted as NTFS. I accidentally copied a Windows 8 recovery partition to this drive and as part of the process it reformantted it is FAT32. Obviously I cannot see any of the previous data. Should it be possible to recover some of this data and if so would I need to format the drive again to NTFS? Thanks for any advice. Cliff