I've got a HD that had about 100 hard errors spread about the drive. I managed to make an image, but the guy formatted and attempted to reinstall Windows. In the past, I've had near perfect recoveries from a format, but this one I'm getting nothing. I'm thinking one of the unreadable sectors had critical information on the directory structure.

Any recommendations for software for a situation like this?

did you look inside of image? quick review should give some point of view. maybe format mean fill all sectors with 0000000.

There is something inside the image. Using a RAW type recovery, I can get lots of pictures. However, this guy needs his Quickbooks files, and they are likely fragmented and unrecoverable with Raw. I did see a full directory structure, but the program I used (Active Partition Recovery) tried to 'fix' the image instead of just recovering files. It's supposed to mount the fixed image, but it didn't work.

2 month ago my 300gb maxtor was accidentialy overwriten by first 2600000 sectors from another system. I just wanted to copy in winhex RAID5 array to another hdd, it was connected by usb2ata extrenal enclosure. i checked properly usb drive, but from some stange reason data was written to my 300gb maxtor - sata. I realized that because LED on usb enclosure did not flash red as usual. I stopped copying on ~2600000 sector. Tryed GDB, R-Studio but results doesnt satisfy me. I tryed Power Data Recovery and 98% was recovered. Disk had less than 500mb free space before it happens, so i think rest 2% was in overwriten first 1,3gb.

I had to investigate why it even happens, my fault was connecting usb cable to usb socket in front of my pc. I realized that cable to usb ports inside pc was not shielded so wasnt satisfy to usb2.0 spec and drive simply disconnects on huge transfer. If you have to use usb adapters, use ports directly from mobo, not any from goldpins.

Thanks for the help. Never heard of Power Data Recovery, but I'm checking it out now.

Others to potentially try: O&O Disk Recovery, Winhex Forensic, AccessData UTK...

Best to have quite a few tools in your toolbox.

scegs

The best software for formatted disks, and even in cases where Windows has been reinstalled over the top of the previous partition, is Ontracks Easy Recovery.

WTF

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Hi. Ontrack Easy Recovery should work fine recovering formatted drives. Also R-Studio works fine. Their websites are http://www.ontrack.com and http://www.r-tt.com and you can get more information there.

Humm. Does the hard drive have any bad sectors? If yes, you should take care. Normally when it happens and has too much bad sectors, the software tools above may not be able to recover your files, And worse, the hard drive can become unreadable. Hard drives with physical problems should be handed by professionals and you can find many includying here at hddguru. But there are a lot o curious people around here and you can be in trouble. I dont know where are you. If you were at South America you could send to http://www.soshd.com.br because they are very good recovering defective hard drives and the prices are very cheap comparing with some companies in USA. Good luck !

Power Data Extractor, based on the physical byte-to-byte technology of SalvationDATA, enables you to recover data from the HDDs with serious bad sectors problems that can not be logically accessed or recovered by OS-based data recovery program .

Furthermore, Power Data Extractor performs only a read-only operation towards the source drive and will not change/delete any byte of the data. Therefore, if the original drive is extremely important and you/your customer would not allow any possible risk of damage the original drive, you can use Power Data Extractor to image the data on the original drive to another one for data recovery.

Besides, Power Data Extractor also helps you to backup your valuable data on special devices, such as backup of industry equipment, medical quipment, special designed equipment data and so on.

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SalvationDATA--Profesionnal Hard drive solution Provider. MSN: sales.laura@salvationdata.com