Best UnFormatting Software?

sWiZzLe · 26 Apr 2011 at 15:50

My Sister who is currently living in Oz has just formatted an external drive which contained all of her photos, music etc

She bought a tv which had a built in PVR, but required a drive..... i guess she didn't understand the term 'Format' :rolleyes:

I've used GetDataBack in the past but its rather fiddly. Could someone please recommend some software that a beginner could use?

She needs to be able to recover the entire partition.

Cheers

JonJ678 · 26 Apr 2011 at 16:18

She's just learnt why backups are important.

The software to use here is testdisk, but it's not particularly friendly. Knowing what format does would be a prerequisite.

Destination · 26 Apr 2011 at 16:38

Recurva?

Uhtred · 26 Apr 2011 at 16:38

testdisk will do the job and will restore the file system or you can use recuva if you just want the files back

AtaRo · 26 Apr 2011 at 17:37

Try recovermyfiles got good results with it also tried getdataback but it had trouble rebuilding drive mft.

sWiZzLe · 26 Apr 2011 at 20:03

Thanks for the replies.

Can these programs run across usb cables for use with external drives, or would this drive have to be put into a pc?

Also, if the drive was put aside and not used for a month would the data still be there in the same state as it is now? - She will be back in UK this time next month.

Cheers

Paracelsus · 26 Apr 2011 at 20:15

Yes and yes.

But she better hope it was a 'quick format' ie. marking the drive as free as opposed to an actual format. If the latter then she's screwed unless willing to pay serious money to a data recovery company with the necessary equipment.

Uhtred · 26 Apr 2011 at 21:01

Paracelsus said:
Yes and yes.

But she better hope it was a 'quick format' ie. marking the drive as free as opposed to an actual format. If the latter then she's screwed unless willing to pay serious money to a data recovery company with the necessary equipment.

Not so, a full format doesn't overwrite - it just checks each sector, which the quick format doesn't do.

Buchanan0204 · 27 Apr 2011 at 01:33

Paracelsus said:
Yes and yes.

But she better hope it was a 'quick format' ie. marking the drive as free as opposed to an actual format. If the latter then she's screwed unless willing to pay serious money to a data recovery company with the necessary equipment.

As already mentioned. Luckily this isn't the case, I would personally wait till she's in the UK and then you can do it for her. Then there wont be any more mishaps

AbsenceJam · 27 Apr 2011 at 14:33

Zap said:
Not so, a full format doesn't overwrite - it just checks each sector, which the quick format doesn't do.

Vista onwards it zeros the partition. So if the format was full then recovery is impossible.

Uhtred · 27 Apr 2011 at 17:48

AbsenceJam said:
Vista onwards it zeros the partition. So if the format was full then recovery is impossible.

well, you learn something new each day!

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941961/en-us

sWiZzLe · 29 Apr 2011 at 12:16

Cheers for the replies, been having problems getting hold of her,
It seems that after she formatted it (apparently it took ages to format), she tested it by recording some stuff on to it...so it doesn't look good.
She's given it to an IT bloke at her work to see if he can get anything off it.
I'll have a look at it when she returns.

...now excuse while I go back to hiding from the street party my neighbours are currently setting up :rolleyes:

Aod · 30 Apr 2011 at 10:52

sWiZzLe said:
Cheers for the replies, been having problems getting hold of her,
It seems that after she formatted it (apparently it took ages to format), she tested it by recording some stuff on to it...so it doesn't look good.

sounds like She's well and truly ruined it.

Due to the way that modern drives write data to the disk (nearest available space), it's likely that she's overwritten large parts of many many different files.