Help! Just formatted an External HD!

[MyDogSkip]

how can i get the information back! I clicked the wrong drive!

ARGH!!

[elkatas]

how can i get the information back! I clicked the wrong drive!

ARGH!!

Mac or PC? And did you do quick or standard format?

[MyDogSkip]

pc, standard

[briareos_kerensky]

First, search for a recover program like Get Data Back and see if it can scan an external HDD and how much info it will recover. If you don't find any you'll need to remove the HHD from its external tray and connect it to the PC via SATA or PATA, whatever technology the HDD uses: this will void the warranty of the external HDD, if still valid.

Then you just need to scan the HDD and hope that the recovery program will do its work. I used Get Data Back on three defective HDDs and it recovered everything, although a formatted HDD could be harder to recover.

[randombs]

Before you do anything, unplug the hard drive. Don't leave it hooked up to the PC (I'm assuming you're using Windows) as random writes will make things much more difficult (and possibly expensive). Windows will do all kinds of silly things like possibly make restore points or God-knows-what.

The key to successful recovery is that the drive is not tampered with since the deletion.

Don't plug it back in until you've found some decent software that will recover partitions.

Partition recovery is usually a cinch compared with individual file recovery as it's just a case of editing the little bit of the hard drive that holds info on what partitions are there.

In my case, the partitions (I had 3) all got deleted by a PS2 hard drive program thing, not formatted, so there was no drive letters or anything, it just showed up completely empty in Windows (wouldn't show up in My Computer, only Disk Management) which meant the data was 100% safe.

I had the same problem a few years ago, and I bought this program called Active@Partition Recovery for about £15 online, and it worked for me. It's a dos program, though, so no USB support, but all it took was a scan and it found the missing partitions and let me recover them.

They've since updated the software with proper Windows support, and they have a demo on their site which will scan and tell you if it finds anything but won't recover unless you buy it.

http://www.partition-recovery.com/

Of course there are other programs, so just see what you can find.

Just remember the golden rule - keep the drive untouched until the time for recovery!

[Widegoat]

Good luck mate. I did this but used Active Kill Disc - with a three pass random overwrite of the entire drive. Needless to say I didn't get anything back - but found quite a good program in the process called Spinrite.

[MyDogSkip]

Thanks for all the help guys, Unfortunately ive spent about £20 on different programs to try and get the data back, but with no joy. I think its because my housemate plugged it into his mac and formatted it again, so now its all gone

Crapola!

[randombs]

Well it's up to you, but I think you can still sort it out, depends on how precious the data is to you.

I'd still say at least try Partition Recovery, there's a free demo that'll at least tell you if you can or not, you've got nothing to lose. It's got a deep search that looks for the actual partition info, and the demo is the same as the paid-for one only you can't recover what it finds, but at least you'll know without spending a penny.

http://www.partition-recovery.com/download.htm