I made a serious blunder, and accidentally reformatted a slave drive on my computer.

It's a half terabyte harddrive, and I used the program Swiss Knife to do so. The format was from FAT32 to FAT32, so I'm lucky there, and I'm pretty sure it was a quick format. Theoretically, all the files should be intact, and just missing their headers, so I just need to find a way to put them back in. I also haven't written to the HDD since it was reformatted, so nothing should have been overwritten

Edit: I managed to find 2 programs that worked, I'll just leave the list, for anyone's future reference.

I have already tried multiple programs:
1. Active @ Undelete 7: Can't run for some reason..
2. Free Undelete: Doesn't find any files, just the stuff already lying around.
3. GetDataBack for FAT: Also couldn't find the files, after 4 hours of searching, returned same results as Free Undelete. Currently Retesting...
4. Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery: Said that the drive wasn't a functional drive or something like that, after 4 hours of scanning.
5. EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Professional: Found every file, very quick scan, see better description below.
6. Recover My Files: Unbelievably slow scanning, however, was able to find all the files.
7. Recuva: Only found a single video files

The files being stored were from Mac and from Windows, mostly video files were on there, from family videos, and it would really suck if I can't recover them.

Any ideas?

Edit:

Okay, I managed to do it, Recover My Files and EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard were both able to successfully recover all files, however, Recover My Files took a ridiculously long time scanning the files. Both were able to recover them, file names and all, but EASEUS scanned faster than anything else, and was much more intuitive, apparently it was NTFS somehow, but I remember it being FAT32, so something weird must have happened there. EASEUS did not ask me for much information, it did a quick scan, and provided possible recoveries, in a list from most likely to least likely, the most likely was the perfect recovery, thanks EASEUS!

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Nov 24 2008, 10:03 pm by Falkoner.

My hard drive wiped last year and I tried many free programs, none of them worked. I finally found one that worked. http://www.recovermyfiles.com/ got back all my pictures videos ,word docs, etc. All the files weren't labeled, but I don't believe there is a program that can (maybe though). I will see if I can PM you an Activation key.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

TestDisk isn't what I need, I didn't lose a partition, I just formatted over it.

Also, thanks Joker, I'll test it out soon.

You can try Recuva, it's from the same people that make CCleaner.
http://www.recuva.com/

Okay, I'll try all these out, let them run all night, see if any of them find anything in the morning. Thanks guys.

My first comment:
Go to NTFS. Unless you're running Windows 95/98/ME (I doubt), you should do this. FAT16 and FAT32 only allow for you to store files up to 4GB in size at at time because the file-allocation-tables aren't designed to take that kinda stuff. Also, it can increase the physical space of the drive massivley: a 120GB FAT drive becomes around 121GB when it is formatted in NTFS.

There is one downside: you cannot use NTFS on Windows 95/98/ME because NTFS technically doesn't exist on those machines.

Comment 2:
A normal file delete simply dissasembles all the bytes in a file. They can be reassembled with tools (and, yes, I have had to do this once or twice...) and do not ceace to exist until somthing is written over the top of the data.

Unlike file deletes, a drive formats actually removes each byte of data insted of just scrambling it. Formatted drives, depending on manufacture, conditions and many other variables, can OR cannot be recovered, because some versions of Microsoft just don't make it easy.

Somthing like Moose suggested may work, or, I would suggest the internal Windows Data Recovery Tool (yes, it does exist) from the Windows Utitlty Disk.

If this does not work, I have to say it's gone.

Well, good news, I managed to recover the files, after going through multiple programs, one was finally able to do it, you can see how it worked out in my first post.


I am using FAT32 as the harddrive is being shared between a Mac and a Windows machine, NTFS is mostly windows, and FAT32 is more universal.


I understand how it works perfectly, in fact, judging by your description, I would say I understand it better than you do, as it does not disassemble all the bytes in the file, unless you use a secure deletion tool, it simply removes the header of the files, leaving the rest intact.
Now, if I had done a complete format, then maybe your second statement would be true, although it may still be recoverable as the track that the original data was written on may have been written on in a different spot. However, I did a quick format, so it simply ran through and removes all the headers.

I made it simple to understand for slightly computer-illiterate people.

At least you have your data again.