Hi,

I stumbled across this forum and was hoping I could have an issue resolved by the help of people on this forum rather than paying a fortune to have my data recovered. Worse case scenario would be to send my hard drive off and have them assess the situation.

So here is the chain of events which resulted in me losing all my data on my WD external hard drive.
- Hard drive was Journaled
- On my Macbook, I went to partition the hard drive into a FAT32 in order to allow my TV read the drive. Little did I know that the format would occur instantaneously without a prompt message with 'Are you sure?'.
- The moment I realised it was doing a format, I cancelled.
- Hard drive was now wiped and formatted to FAT32
- First I used a free version of Recovery Remo which took close to 24 hours and located the lost files
- Now that I knew there were files, I downloaded a Windows based version of Ease US (couldn't find a Mac version which worked) and started the process again on a Windows laptop
- The files again were retrieved through Ease US, but silly me saved the files onto the exact same hard drive
- After realising half way, I cancelled the copying of files and removed the files off the hard drive
- Closed Ease US and reran the search where this time only locating a fraction of the files
- This time I copied it onto another hard drive but was not able to open any of the files as they kept saying 'Corrupted'


Now I know there were many many many mistakes I made along the way, but I was wondering if there was anything I could do to get all the files back and be saved on a new hard drive which are not corrupt.
If I personally cannot do it, would one of those data recovery companies be able to do anything different?

Thanks in advance for your response.

Whatever areas on the drive that contained the old files [those needed to be recovered] were overwritten by the format and newly recovered files cannot be recovered. Hence, getting corrupt messages. Whatever has not been overwritten, could be recovered.

Just have to execute the process correctly in recovering the files to a 2nd drive. Ideally, you would want to clone the drive to a 2nd drive and work off the recovery from clone to that 2nd drive where the files will be saved to.

As far as costing a fortune, it is a myth. What is a fortune to you?

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts