program to recover formatted HDD

builder22 · 15 Mar 2014 at 19:59

a mate has managed to format his USB external hard drive
I know there are programs for recovering deleted files - do they work with formatted drives and what ones would you recommend?

OhEsEcks · 15 Mar 2014 at 20:12

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

How the drive was formatted depends on the success of what can be recovered. You may get bits and pieces, but certainly not a full scope of what was on it.

builder22 · 16 Mar 2014 at 01:38

cheers, will give it a go
better getting bits and pieces rather than nothing

andy_mk3 · 16 Mar 2014 at 11:13

If it was formatted in Windows then youll get everything back no problem. If done with dban or anything g that overwrites the drive, you may struggle.