Formatted wrong drive need to unformat please offer solution

[yoda313]

HELP!

oh man I screwed up this time. I was trying to reformat an external harddrive but I ended up foramtting my secondary internal by mistake.

As soon as I realized it I switched off the power on the computer hoping to stop it. Unfortunately the damage is done and its reading as a blank drive.

I did set a restore point for the drive the other day but system restore comes up with an unexpected error message of some type.

There is nothing truly priceless on it. Its mainly for video backup and stuff. But if I can get it back I'd love it.

So any ideas for a stupid mistake like this?

[Number Six]

Try freeundelete - it worked wonders for me - but I did not format the drive.

http://officerecovery.com/freeundelete/

[ntscuser]

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

Works even if Windows cannot read the drive. Saved my arse on two occasions.

[yoda313]

Thanks numbersix. I'm trying a free prog called testdisk. Its better than that 70.00 recovermyfiles I was looking at. Hopefully it works.

I'll check yours out next.

Edit - @ntscuser - yep just trying testdisk right now. Here's hoping....

EDIt ok using the file system recovery it was able to start recovering files. However the drive is larger than my main drive and my external is not large enough to fit everything.

Is it possible to read the recovery information by original directory? ALso its copying them to a new file name so I can't easily see what it was originally. Is there a way to just select a single directory at a time and restore it to a seperate drive?

Or is it possible to somehow magically reconstruct the drive onto itself? Is that possible? To recreate the original sturcture as it were?

[Number Six]

If freeundelete works, it will read the drive and tell you what is available to recover - then you can pick and choose what to recover, and I think you can tell it where to put it. I think it also keeps the orig file name. You can do this several times until you recover everything, since it is not changing the affected drive at all. After you recover some of it, then burn those files to a DVD to clear the space again.

BTW - I did not realize that you added more info because your edits did not bump the thread back to the top

[RabidDog]

Depends whether you did a quick format or a full format.. or even a DOD approved 7 write wipe...
Quick format should be no problem for recovery software.. other two?? Luck will decide..

Solution to this problem? Get your Bro onto your PC, and get him to delete/rename the inbuilt format program..so that you have to phone him up before formatting anything.
NEVER Full format a Hard disk, once you have written data to it.

[redwudz]

A bit late, but if I repartition/reformat a drive, I unplug the other drives. Windows, especially, doesn't always make clear what drive it is working on. I have some computers with several of the exact same drives. No easy way to tell them apart. (BTW, I have done the exact same thing more than once. )

yoda313, this is mainly for others, no offense intended.

Good luck and I hope for a full recovery.

[ntscuser]

Is it possible to read the recovery information by original directory? ALso its copying them to a new file name so I can't easily see what it was originally. Is there a way to just select a single directory at a time and restore it to a seperate drive?

TestDisk can. Navigation through the directories is a bit clumsy though. It doesn't rename files but the syntax may be slightly altered.

Or is it possible to somehow magically reconstruct the drive onto itself? Is that possible? To recreate the original sturcture as it were?

TestDisk's creator claims it is but having tried it never seems to work.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Turning the power off during the formatting may hurt your chances (but hopefully not!)

[ntscuser]

A bit late, but if I repartition/reformat a drive, I unplug the other drives. Windows, especially, doesn't always make clear what drive it is working on. I have some computers with several of the exact same drives.

You're telling me! I've also had a boot rescue disc rewrite the file allocation table of a data-only drive by mistake, making it totally invisible to Windows. My internal data drive is backed up to an external USB drive, but not nearly as often as it should.

[vid83]

HELP!

oh man I screwed up this time. I was trying to reformat an external harddrive but I ended up foramtting my secondary internal by mistake.
As soon as I realized it I switched off the power on the computer hoping to stop it. Unfortunately the damage is done and its reading as a blank drive.
I did set a restore point for the drive the other day but system restore comes up with an unexpected error message of some type.
There is nothing truly priceless on it. Its mainly for video backup and stuff. But if I can get it back I'd love it.
So any ideas for a stupid mistake like this?

I was just about to come one here and asked a similar question or see if anyone has a hard drive recovery software they recommend.
When my laptop crashed a few weeks ago, I accidentally took out the laptop drive and inserted another laptop drive that was in an external enclosure. I then inserted the HP recovery CD to format the drive. I totally forgot that the drive that was in the external enclosure was used to back up my family's computer files. So all of my family's files and digital photos for the past few years were lost, including vacation photos. I felt bad. However, I remembered that I had a recovery CD that was included with my Sandisk SD card reader. It is not for use with hard drives but I were able to recover photos. Unfortunately other files (Microsoft Word, etc.) were not recovered. So I am now looking for a recovery CD that is designed for hard drives.

[zoobie]

one thing MS doesn't tell you is to disconnect all hard drives except the one you're (re)formatting...I forgot this a few years ago and it turned all my footage on my 2nd hard drive to raw data...making it virtually useless

[Bjs]

http://findandmount.com/
http://findandmount.com/howtouse/ > Mounting partitions

[jollyjohn]

I have been very successful and lucky to recover data from reformatted HDDs with "O&O DiskRecovery" You can select and unselect the file types you want to recover before you start.

[Nelson37]

First, BIG Ditto on the "disconnect all other drives before formatting". Saves a LOT of grief.

Second, DO NOT repeat NOT attempt to recover data to the same drive. The recovery is only possible because of the unchanged File allocation table, every file you write will destroy access to one or more others. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.

Lots of recovery software out there, GetDataBack has easily earned back the money I spent on it. There should be a freebie out there that could handle this.

Turning off the power may have royally screwed the pooch, but you might get lucky.

Life is a series of learning experiences.

[ahhaa]

Yoda- sincere sympathies; repeat this while working: "Open the door, Hal' - it may help.

Mostly I agree with what has been said above. One other thought, however... if you try almost any Linux LiveCD these days, it will let you read and write to Win-formatted drives. As it installs only in RAM to run, it won't need a damaged drive to operate. So you can inspect the drive and copy off any remaining contents, restore a specific MBR, etc. There are 'tiny' (250M download) distros like System Rescue that are intended for this, and also Puppy (100M) and other OSs like Mandriva and Ubuntu that display all drive contents right on the startup desktop.
http://distrowatch.com/

General tip- You guys do know you can rename your drives & partitions, right? Simple; just Right-Mouse-Button it.
This is especially useful if you are using a variety of machines and flash drives- its a lot clearer to see a label H:PhotoArchive2009 than HRV2_VOL3...

[handyguy]

Turning the power off during a format is next to impossible to recover from. I did it once.

[yoda313]

@ahaa - thanks. I'm downloading puppy right no - 94mb. I'll give that a try.

I have yet to do anything to the drive so as long as some of it is recoverable it should still be accessible.

In the end I can live with reformatting and losing it. I'd hate to do it but the main thing I had on it were video projects. So I do thankfully have the originals. Although some of it might be lost.....

[DarrellS]

one thing MS doesn't tell you is to disconnect all hard drives except the one you're (re)formatting...I forgot this a few years ago and it turned all my footage on my 2nd hard drive to raw data...making it virtually useless

I tried to install an IDE controller card a year ago on an Intel board and for some reason, Windows turned the data on both my SATA storage drives to RAW. I took the card back (couldn't get it to work anyway) and the tech told me to bring the drives in cause he felt bad about it and said he'd try and recover them. I brought one in and he said he had to erase it and reformat it so I lost all the data off that drive, 450GB. He was closed for the weekend so I thought I'd search for software to try and recover the data sine I didn't want to lose another 450GB of data. I found the software that Nelson recommended, Getdataback and was able to recover everything on the drive. Too bad I took the other drive in or I would've recovered all my data.

[yoda313]

Ok I got puppy downloaded and burnt to a cdr. It is now running in ram and I am even surfing as we speak on it.

Down on the lower left of the screen only my c drive and restore partition d (the one hp sets up on newer pavilions) are visible - plus the optical dvd drive of course.

How am I supposed to use this to get to the e drive? It is not initiated (it was formatting when I shut it

[ahhaa]

OK, Yoda...
good work so far! I can't stay online today, so just in case, here's the addy for the friendly forum at Puppy
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/index.php

if you are seeing the c: & d: NTFS drives/partitions, then they are 'mounted'; but not the e: that could be a really bad sign. I'd next check and see if the e: drive is findable in the system tools- as if you were going to mount it. Then go looking for the backup MBR- for that drive!!! (for info, google MBR that's a Microsoft KB issue)

what you want to do, I think, is restore/fix mbr; but the real bad thing is pulling the plug while the record head was active, that made it kinda difficult to diagnose.

[ahhaa]

gotta go- but wanted to underline the Puppy forum as a place that treats windows folks kindly; and they have their share of HD probs so there's plenty of expertise frequenting the HowTos (also there's a mediamaniac version available)
also BJs Find&Mount looks useful too

use the Force, Luke!:]

[yoda313]

@ahaa and everyone - thanks for all the advice.

Howver I have lost my patience in this......

I bit the bullet and refomratted. I want to move forward.

The way I look at it I didn't lose any pcitures or precious memories. (I have those backed up on dvdr and another computer).

I also scrounged around and found some more backup discs I had made (thankfully). So I'll be able to gain back a good portion of it. At least I was smart enough to back up all my patch downloads and program files so I won't have to redownload those that would have sucked....

I do appreciate eveyones timely respones and shared horror stories. I also didn't feel like paying 80.00 for software to MAYBE recover some files. Also my bind was that the drive that was erased was larger than any other drive I have availalbe (my largest external is 320gb - 298 formatted - so I couldn't do a direct dump even if it was possible).

Anyhow - this was a good lesson to remind me to burn more discs and look before I CLICK YES!!

Thanks again...

[Nelson37]

Just for future reference, GetDataBAck does allow you to save individual files, and has worked for me at least twice when the drive was not recognized by Windows.

[rhegedus]

Try TestDisk - you'd be surprised what it can do. I recovered all of my files after I lost the partition after swapping some drives around. https://forum.videohelp.com/topic356584.html

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

[TBoneit]

FWIW in the future for those that have this problem, there do exist unformat programs, I've used them in the past. As far back as the DOS days. I can't dredge the name out of memory to post it, sorry.

Worst thing to do is interrupt the format, Let it finish the use and unformat program to recover.

Been there, Done it.

[Xylob the Destroyer]

FileScavenger will read and pull files from a drive that Windows cannot see.
I've used several programs of this type and FileScavenger works the best in my experience.
It's not free though...

[yoda313]

Well hopefully this thread will prove useful for others in the future.

For me I just need to remember to make more backups. Thankfully like I said I did have my downloaded programs burnt so I have already recopied those.

Oh well live and learn.....

[lordsmurf]

I always format from with the COMPUTER MANAGEMENT console (right click My Computer, go to Manage).

[AlanHK]

Or is it possible to somehow magically reconstruct the drive onto itself? Is that possible? To recreate the original structure as it were?

From later posts this is probably moot, but testdisk can do this in many cases.

It analyses your disk then proposes a partition layout. If you accept this (basically, you have nothing to lose so if it looks like your original layout, just accept it), then it writes a new MBR and that should resurrect your disk.
The MBR (Master Boot Record) is the table of contents of the disk. Lose that and you lose everything. Conversely, recreate it and you get everything back.

It worked for me on a disk that I'd kept in a drawer for a year after Windows had messed up when it crashed.

It can take several hours to do the analysis as it has to read the entire disk (possibly days for hundreds of GB) to look for file pointers. So be patient.