HELP!! I Formatted the wrong hard drive... Lost everything!!

[Mad Mark]

Basically I removed my existing drive and made my secondary hard drive the master (switching jumpers accordingly) with the intentions of doing a fresh XP install. But it seemed to have defaulted to the external drive and formatted that instead!
I have lost years of pictures videos documents etc.

Is there a way of retrieving this data?

[Stu R]

I'd be getting in touch with a data recovery firm. Normally I'd suggest some Data recovery software, but if it's been formatted, and there is a lot of stuff you'd like recovering, it's a job best left to the pros.

Has anything been written to the drive since it was formatted?

[Mad Mark]

Unfortunately As I did it with the XP disk in as part of the re-install process it formatted it and then wrote XP over the top!!

It's not looking good, but I am sure it is possible. There are recovery programs for memory cards and the police manage to do it to catch various criminals. But as to whether its possible to do it at home is another matter!

[S6PNJ]

EASEUS data recovery is a good piece of software, I think you can try it before you buy it as in it will show you what you can recover but you need to buy it to unlock it in order to recover your files. I've used it to good effect. Or if you know anything about torrents and have no morals, look there!

[edg516]

We use these people at work http://www.dq-int.co.uk/ fast service and they do a free diags test to let you know what can be recovered

[deckster]

Mad Mark said:

Unfortunately As I did it with the XP disk in as part of the re-install process it formatted it and then wrote XP over the top!!

It's not looking good, but I am sure it is possible. There are recovery programs for memory cards and the police manage to do it to catch various criminals. But as to whether its possible to do it at home is another matter!

Sorry chap - with the best will in the world, without expensive specialist help I'd have said you're hosed. The kind of forensic recovery you're talking about will cost into 4 figures. If you've formatted and installed a new OS then you're going to be very lucky to get anything significant back from the disk with anything you can do at home.

I presume you're not using the disk at the moment?

[squicky]

If it's really important data, than I'd be tempted just to get the professionals to recover as much as they can - at least that way given it's there day job, they're likely to have more success than a random PC app. (Well that's what I'd hope anyway!)

(Reminds me to sort out my backup strategy.... I'd hate to loose all my important documents and pictures).

[EINSIGN]

http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.co.uk/

[Frederick]

It won't be totally hosed, the overwritten sectors will more than likely be useless, but a fresh install of XP should be under 1gb.

Lets say the drive was 20gb, if you formatted it and installed XP, you'd be looking at 19gb free space. Provided you have done NOTHING else to it, any data in that 19gb should be recoverable.

Formatting isn't as destructive as it is made out to be, it (for the most part) just zeroes the FAT and starts again. Try giving it the once over with Recuva. It won't be able to restore any directory structures - they will be vapourised, but losing 1gb of data vs losing all of it is a lot more preferable!

[MikeyC]

Try http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

You will be able to get some of it back, just not all.

There's a try-b4-buy option to see what can be recovered.

HTH

[fluffnik]

PhotoRec is free and it Just Works.

It won't recover anything that's been overwritten but it should get the rest.

[Holst]

S6PNJ said:

EASEUS data recovery is a good piece of software, I think you can try it before you buy it as in it will show you what you can recover but you need to buy it to unlock it in order to recover your files. I've used it to good effect. Or if you know anything about torrents and have no morals, look there!

I have used this before on an formatted drive and it worked pretty well, I got back 99% of the lost files (this was a 50gb drive with about 30gb of data on it)

If you did a full format rather than a quick one things might be more difficult.

Just make sure you dont write anything more onto the drive or you will make things worse.

[PJ S]

http://www.prosoftengineering.com/products/media_t...

[Mad Mark]

Thanks guys.
I got a few suggestions but more would be welcome before I take the next step.
Its a 300 gb external drive and apart from writing XP on to it no I haven't written anything since. Unfortunately I did the 'slow' format rather than the quick so that probably wont help much either.

I was wondering though that If I try one piece of software which either doesn't work or only retrieves part of the data would this effect the effectiveness of another piece of software or me taking the drive to a shop?

Thanks again for the help so far

[TonyToniTone]

I would try one where you use a bootable CD first like PJ S posted - you won't be doing any more damage that way.

[S6PNJ]

Mad Mark said:

Unfortunately I did the 'slow' format rather than the quick so that probably wont help much either.

Makes no odds AFAIK. The long format simply adds a diskchk to the process, the format is the same regardless.

Why not try EASEUS, it's a 5.86Mb download (free) so won't take ages, but will let you know what you can and can't recover from your external disk, just make sure you download and install it to your local disk not the disk you want to recover.

[fluffnik]

Mad Mark said:

Thanks guys.
I got a few suggestions but more would be welcome before I take the next step.
Its a 300 gb external drive and apart from writing XP on to it no I haven't written anything since. Unfortunately I did the 'slow' format rather than the quick so that probably wont help much either.

PhotoRec is entirely non destructive but you will need to boot from another disk and have 300G of free space to recover your data to.

If you use an Ubuntu live CD you can install PhotoRec on the live system...

[911mot]

I once did the same thing when upgrading my mums PC. Formatted drive and installed windows. Then she asks me where all her music files had gone. Gulp. Managed to recover 99% of them by putting the drive in another PC and using a data recovery program. It was so long ago I forget which program I used sorry

[S27]

There are a number of free utilities you can try photorec as above or Recuva from http://www.piriform.com/recuva/download which has an easier interface to photorec in my opinion, remember to enable the deep scan if you use it, with a 300 gb HDD you should recover a substancial amount of data which is now sitting in unallocated space.

In your predicament I would try the free options first, and I would suggest that no further data is written to the disk, to this end I would acquire a sata / IDE to USB adapter to connect the drive to another machine via a usb cable, and install a usb write protect software such as http://ptf.com/get/467859/ this will prevent data being written to the usb device and this will prevent the loss of any other data and still gives you an option of considering data recovery with professional software, however I would suspect you should recover a vast amount of your data using the above programs.

SP

[spants]

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regards
Tony