formatted hdd incorrectly

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nevilence

nevilence

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May 8, 2012
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I have a WD 500g passport and it has been working 100%. Today however I was trying to format an sd card using SD formatter 4 and without paying enough attention formatted my wd hdd. windows doesnt see it anymore and I tired a quick format using HDD low level format tool with no success. Does anyone have any further suggestions as to what I might do to recover my hdd.

Cheers
 
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Shaun o

Shaun o

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Oct 7, 2007
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Yep I have one.
The drive when you first get it comes in factory raw state.
SD card format uses a slightly different file table allocation.

So its why windows could not read the drive or file system created.
Doing a low level format can sometimes completely destroy a drive, and not recommended.
If you did a low level It wipes all the information or existing file system.
Nothing will get it back.
When you format a drive under Ntfs, it does not physically delete data but sets all the data point flags back to a zero state. So the drive knows data can be over written and takes it as free space.
A copy of the existing file system or structure of the drive is stored in another place.
when you use recovery software the second table is used to rebuild the file system and Data as backup reference.
To un format it.
A low level format wipes this out.
And is often done to drives, in large corporate company's as a security measure to make sure the data is never retrieved.
In other words no amount of recovery will get the data back.

It wipes the backup file table, system. And disk map locations of the magnetic platter.



 
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nevilence

nevilence

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I wasnt worried about the data really and understood I wasnt going to get it back. However I did work it out. It wouldnt show in windows because the sd formatter software deleted all partitions. Once I partitioned the hdd it was good as gold again. Key lesson being, double and triple check drive letters before punching ok on formatting software.

Thanks for the replies though guys
 
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