Hard Disk Recovery

[webdesania]

Hi Guys,

I have a hard disk drive that was installed in a network storage device and I have accidentally formatted it. I have never written on it after that. I can access it using a regular usb enclosure. The hard drive is a 250 GB western digital 7200 rpm SATA.

I am looking to recover all data on it with directory structures and all files. I have tried several commercial software, but they take a long time to test and I am not sure if I am using the right one.

Any help in this regard would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Webdi.

[michael chiklis]

What type of format did you do?
Complete formatting (which needs hours to complete on big drives) or fast formatting?

[webdesania]

I think it was fast through the nsd and when I did a scan using some of the available software, some did not give me complete files, and other did give me complete files. I did not complete the recovery because: 1. the softwares were in trial mode and I was exploring which one is the best before getting a complete version, 2. I was more concerned on getting all the files with the directory structure.

[michael chiklis]

R-Studio is the best software, if MFT is still ok he can recover also folders structure.
Hope you didn't save files on the drive which you are trying to recover!!
Data must be saved on a third drive, it's very important or you will overwrite sectors on the formatted drive and loose the chance to recover data from it.

[Cleanroom]

try UFS Exploerer.

It came out of a NAS, so it is using ext 2/3/4 or and XFS file structure most likely.

I prefer UFS Explorer for NAS devices

good luck

BUT FIRST..... CLONE THE DRIVE OR MAKE A FILE IMAGE OF THE DRIVE....

always good to have a backup before you start messing around.

[webdesania]

@ michael: I did not write on it. I just hooked it to the usb enclosure and tried to recover from my laptop. thank you for the advise. I will try the software you mentioned and keep you posted.

@ Cleanroom: Thank you buddy for the advise. I will try that as well and keep you posted.

Thank you for your help guys. I will keep you all posted of the results. That should take couple of days or so.

[webdesania]

Any idea on how to use RStudio to recover the data? I never used it before and it seems it requires some programming.

[labtech]

No need for programming. Click on your drive (not partition), which should be listed under all drives in the left pane, then click "Scan" button. Select detailed scan and save the scan somewhere other than the formatted drive.

If still confused, click on help/about and read the manual.

I too recommend UFS Explorer as there is a high chance the data partition could be XFS.

[digitalferret]

Check you have the right R-Studio : http://www.r-tt.com/
its not the programming RStudio one ....