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Recovering the drive?
Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 12:53 pm
by Tim Burton
I had 2 external drives plugged in (same size). I thought the right one was turned on that I wanted to format. Murphy struck and it was the wrong one. I'd haven't done anything to the drive, except format it.
Is there a way to recover the data that was on there? Is it free? Any help would be appreciated.
Re: Recovering the drive?
Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 4:45 pm
by shamrok3
Nope. Once you format a drive, its contents are unrecoverable. I'm sorry but once you format a drive, that data is gone for good.
Re: Recovering the drive?
Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 4:50 pm
by DMB2000uk
shamrok3 wrote:Nope. Once you format a drive, its contents are unrecoverable. I'm sorry but once you format a drive, that data is gone for good.
Depends if it was a full zeroing of the drive, or just a quick format and deletion of partition tables etc.
Had a quick look, but anything I could see wanted money for it.
Dan
PS. This might be worth a shot:
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm? ... 139&page=8
Re: Recovering the drive?
Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 9:14 pm
by pwcmed
I used this along time ago and it worked pretty good. I can't say how much the demo does but it's worth a shot.
http://www.active-undelete.com/download.htm
Re: Recovering the drive?
Posted: Wed Jan 13, 2010 12:26 am
by Tim Burton
Thanks. Nothing on that drive was extremely important, but it'd be nice to have...
Re: Recovering the drive?
Posted: Wed Jan 13, 2010 4:56 am
by ColdPlay
Hi guys!
Last year I did the stupid thing by formatting my external (backup!)
and I delivered it to a store to get some help. They formatted it and said they couldn't find anything on it!
Then I downloaded recuva and it worked grate! Found almost everything!
I hope it will for you aswell, its freware, only needs registering .here it is
http://www.piriform.com/recuva
If you are able to, feel free to support them, they've done a great job with that program!
Good luck!
Re: Recovering the drive?
Posted: Wed Jan 13, 2010 5:10 am
by ColdPlay
shamrok3 wrote:Nope. Once you format a drive, its contents are unrecoverable. I'm sorry but once you format a drive, that data is gone for good.
Hi there, I'm not a pro, but this is not the truth !
There are companies that does reconstructing of data for a living, and data is almost always just overwritten and more or less available.
You need to use certain software if you want to be sure that data is totally deleted, but that I guess is not everyones need!
If you are lucky you can find it easy by yourself, using freeware like recuva , but if not and the data lost is worth a lot to you you can try and deliver it to people that are experts on it.
Se ya, ColdOut

Re: Recovering the drive?
Posted: Wed Jan 13, 2010 7:19 am
by nightblood
Formatting a drive doesn't erase the data on it.
Formatting only erases references to the data.
Re: Recovering the drive?
Posted: Wed Jan 13, 2010 2:47 pm
by ibleet
Don't panic if you accidentally reformat a disk that has useful data. Reformatting does not erase the data on the disk, only the address tables.