Data recover for Reformatted drive

[themaster1]

I'm looking for a good data recovery software. I've mistakenly reformatted a 1 TB drive. I've tried the well known photorec freeware (Data carving kind), found some but lots of garbage with videos smaller than they should be etc...
The problem being that i've copied about 30 Gigs of new data before realising.

Isn't there a mean to unformart somehow ?
It's a Nfts partition (actually 2 partitions now)

Thanks for your inputs

[davexnet]

Something like this can detect lost partitions, worth giving it a go:
https://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/free-data-recovery-software.htm
On the otherhand, testdisk also has the capability to do the same; I used it once when my
MBR got overwritten and the partition table was lost

[pandy]

Low chance if you not defregmented your drive (this is case where defragmenting drive help a lot).

I always respect software quality from diskinternals so you can give a chance https://www.diskinternals.com/ntfs-recovery/

[The_Doman]

For these kind of situations i always use the Getdataback recovery software and do a full/deep scan of the drive to find the lost data.
With a NTFS filesystem the change of recovering files/folders is pretty high.
Of course data in the overwritten part of the disk is forever lost/unrecoverable.
Not freeware but you can preview/open files to see if the recovery is possible/successful.

With tesdisk i never had much luck if you partitioned/formatted the drive yourself.

[sophisticles]

I'm looking for a good data recovery software. I've mistakenly reformatted a 1 TB drive. I've tried the well known photorec freeware (Data carving kind), found some but lots of garbage with videos smaller than they should be etc...
The problem being that i've copied about 30 Gigs of new data before realising.

Isn't there a mean to unformart somehow ?
It's a Nfts partition (actually 2 partitions now)

Thanks for your inputs

https://www.diskinternals.com/ntfs-recovery/

You can try this but I don't know how successful you will be.

A lot will depend if you used the same cluster size when you reformatted the drive as it had originally, if automatic defrag was enabled on the drive, did you do a full format or a quick format, etc.

The problem is that when you reformated the drive you told Windows that the entire drive was available for use and when you started writing data to the drive you overwrote at least 30gb of data.

I think you will be disappointment.

[themaster1]

Does anyone understand how the "custom signatures" work with Testdisk (Photorec) ? I'm hunting for avi but without much success (none found), i know other softwares find some, i must be doing something wrong.
I don't get where you put it that sig file precisely and the format must be ascii aswell, confused (should i use dos/ibm-ascii) in HXD instead of Windows Ansi (default) ?)
Also when i inspect different avi (recorded the same way, same codec etc..) with HXD (hex editor) the first bytes are not the same like
video1 = RIFFøõâAVI LIST video2= RIFFøuãAVI LIST
On the second byte though it's always the same like video 1 = Øþhdrlavih8


There is one tuto here: https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk_doc/photorec_custom_signature.html

[TreeTops]

themaster1...start a new post. Your question does not seem related to data recovery.

[themaster1]

It very much is related to data recovery: using an option of testdisk (custom signatures of video files, in my case AVI's)

[thecoalman]

Also when i inspect different avi (recorded the same way, same codec etc..) with HXD (hex editor) the first bytes are not the same like
video1 = RIFFøõâAVI LIST video2= RIFFøuãAVI LIST
On the second byte though it's always the same like video 1 = Øþhdrlavih8

Not sure if it's related but when using FTP if you transfer a binary file using ASCII mode it will corrupt the header in the file.

Overall as you delete files on a disk that space is made available to other files, when you reformat it's all made available. Once it's overwritten with new data the old data is gone. As already noted if it wasn't defragmented it's an even bigger issue. With a large file it's more likely that chunks of it are written to different locations on the disk increasing the chance parts of it will be overwritten.

[sophisticles]

I think this may be the best bet the OP has:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/top-best-linux-data-recovery-tools

Option #4

https://sourceforge.net/projects/redobackup/

http://redorescue.com/

Download this iso and create a live-usb, use a different drive to store any recovered files and if you haven't already, stop using the disk in question.

If this doesn't work, I will try and give you step by step instructions on a few different methods.

You can also proactive with this:

https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk_doc/testcase.html

I still have my doubts, but you may get lucky.