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Can I recover data off a partially formatted drive?

Forum Storage : Hard Disks - Can I recover data off a partially formatted drive?

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Badnames   11-24-2008 at 05:20:20 AM

I was wondering if I could recover data off a partially formatted hard drive. While installing windows on my laptop, I accidentally chose my external HD (western digital 120gb passport) over the laptop HD. The drive only had the install run for a few seconds, but now everytime i plug it in, it asks me to format it. Is there any way to get the old data off the drive?

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ram1009   12-02-2008 at 04:25:14 AM
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A data recovery service can probably help you but it will be expensive.

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slagbom   12-02-2008 at 05:59:15 AM
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I know NASA can do it for you. It's probably cheaper than locally too :D

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MrLinux   12-02-2008 at 08:47:19 AM
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Try GetDataBack, or just google for data recovery software, there's loads of commercial and free utilities out there...

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ijack   12-02-2008 at 10:52:24 AM
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But be careful! You can make a bad situation worse by trying to do it yourself. Ideally clone the disk and work on the copy.

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SizroSpunkmire   12-02-2008 at 06:18:55 PM
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There are plenty of free recovery tools that can be run. Formatting a drive only wipes the first and last 300 sectors of the disk (essentially the mft and partition tables.). All the data in between is fine and can easily be recovered.

A very common misconception with formating is that it removes all the data. The only reason the data appears deleted is because the Master File Table is no longer present. Windows uses the MFT to address where on the disk the files are. If there is no MFT record for a specific location on the disk, its assumed to be free space. This is why its vital to never create new files on a drive that needs to be recovered; you can accidentally overwrite the data your trying to save.

Formatting a harddrive is like removing the catalog cabinet in your local library that contains all those little dewey-decimal cards without doing anything to the books themselves. Sure the data is still there but locating them is now impossible. Data recovery software doesn't care if there is an MFT or not and simply reads the data on the drive in the same way a librarian can ignore the card catalog and go track down the book directly.


Message edited by SizroSpunkmire on 12-02-2008 at 06:20:59 PM
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