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Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
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Is there any way to restore a low level formatted HDD?

June 10th, 2016, 19:33

Hi Guys,

few hours ago, I found this video online. In this forum there are some russian speaking people, so they are going to understand what he is telling. For the others I'd like to explain it. He is pissed of, that he got some bad comments on his last video where he is destructing a HDD, so he made this video to show, what's possible to restore data on HDD.

What he is doing is that he has an empty HDD. First of all, he copied some videos on the HDD. Then he user the HDD Guru Low Format Tool to format the whole HDD. Then he uses Partition Wizard to restore the partition with the data.

My opinion is, that there is no way, he can restore data from a full wiped HDD, because after a Low Level format, I have zeros in every bit on the HDD. So he had to fake this Video either with the cutting, HPA, head map or something like this. So I was offering him 500$, if he's gonna make a video without any cuts, where he is taking a brand new HDD out of my evidence bags and doing the same thing, where everything is visible, what he is doing. But it seems like he is not understanding it.

What do you think, is there any way, that this is possible without any tricks?

Re: Is there any way to restore a low level formatted HDD?

June 10th, 2016, 21:31

He isn't zeroing out the drive. A true erasure of a 320GB drive would take a lot longer than a minute.

Re: Is there any way to restore a low level formatted HDD?

June 11th, 2016, 3:18

Hi cut this part together. He started the Low-Level Format at 19:00 and finished at 22:30, so it took him 3:30h.

Re: Is there any way to restore a low level formatted HDD?

June 11th, 2016, 17:35

(320 GB) / (25 MB/s) = 3.6 hours (via USB 2.0)

I can't see how it could be relevant, but FWIW the drive's Raw Read Error Rate attribute has bottomed out. The Write Error Rate appears to be nonzero as well. Is it possible that the drive is in readonly mode???

Re: Is there any way to restore a low level formatted HDD?

June 13th, 2016, 17:46

very funny guy.
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