Question about recovering a formatted drive
August 13th, 2020, 0:30
I have been having a lot of difficulty with a formatted drive in my HP Omen laptop.
Backstory:
My HP Omen laptop comes with two drives inside, a 128gb NVMe SSD, and a traditional 1TB SATA HDD. The end of last week, the NVMe SSD died. Being under warranty I thought no biggie, got another SSD sent to me along with a 16gb USB stick which contained HP's Recovery Manager with Windows.
So I installed the new SSD. Through a backdoor way of checking, I could tell my second drive, which the computer sees listed as "DATA (D:)" or the D:\ Drive, was intact with all files there.
I went ahead and used the Recovery USB to reinstall windows and HP's software. The program made no mention of touching the D: drive, and only concentrated on installing Windows, and HP's software in a factory style reset (this should have been my first warning). Once completed, I was devastated. The D: drive was completely blank and empty. Knowing that this dang Recovery USB pretty much reset my laptop right to complete factory I said no biggie, I can use a recovery software to recover the data. Nope, I have tried every program you can think of to recover the data, from many different consumer products to ones like Recovery Explorer Professional that is usually used by data recovery experts, every program can only recover about 1/5th if not less of what was there and half of what it recovers cannot be accessed due to being corrupted or is missing lots of sub folders and file structures.
First, I do know the biggest golden rule to recovering data, 1. Do not use the drive at all until you have recovered what you need. This includes do not install recovery software to the drive or recover files to it directly. So right now the drive is not being accessed at all for anything, nor was any data written to it since the format.
My question, would a data recovery service center have better luck recovering the data then all of the software I have tried? And I have tried a lot from Recoverit, to EaseUS, Stellar, Recovery Explorer and more.
Backstory:
My HP Omen laptop comes with two drives inside, a 128gb NVMe SSD, and a traditional 1TB SATA HDD. The end of last week, the NVMe SSD died. Being under warranty I thought no biggie, got another SSD sent to me along with a 16gb USB stick which contained HP's Recovery Manager with Windows.
So I installed the new SSD. Through a backdoor way of checking, I could tell my second drive, which the computer sees listed as "DATA (D:)" or the D:\ Drive, was intact with all files there.
I went ahead and used the Recovery USB to reinstall windows and HP's software. The program made no mention of touching the D: drive, and only concentrated on installing Windows, and HP's software in a factory style reset (this should have been my first warning). Once completed, I was devastated. The D: drive was completely blank and empty. Knowing that this dang Recovery USB pretty much reset my laptop right to complete factory I said no biggie, I can use a recovery software to recover the data. Nope, I have tried every program you can think of to recover the data, from many different consumer products to ones like Recovery Explorer Professional that is usually used by data recovery experts, every program can only recover about 1/5th if not less of what was there and half of what it recovers cannot be accessed due to being corrupted or is missing lots of sub folders and file structures.
First, I do know the biggest golden rule to recovering data, 1. Do not use the drive at all until you have recovered what you need. This includes do not install recovery software to the drive or recover files to it directly. So right now the drive is not being accessed at all for anything, nor was any data written to it since the format.
My question, would a data recovery service center have better luck recovering the data then all of the software I have tried? And I have tried a lot from Recoverit, to EaseUS, Stellar, Recovery Explorer and more.
Re: Question about recovering a formatted drive
August 13th, 2020, 17:59
Hard to tell it's odd since I have no idea what exactly happened. Ideally your first step now would be cloning it.
Does the drive contain anything right now when accessed via Windows Explorer? So IOW did whatever happened write new data to the drive?
Edit: NVM, I see now, completely blank.
IMO these don't count as attempts. Granted they outperform Notepad when it comes to data recovery, but that's about it.
This is more relevant, too bad you leave out the 'more' part.
Possibly, yes. Some of the better tools produce better results based on tweaking and choices offered during the recovery. A good data recovery tech knows the tweaks and best choices to pick. If however data was actually overwritten then no one can recover it. If file system structures were largely overwritten files detected may be largely due to raw signature scan. The latter will only detect file types it has signatures for which may explain why a smaller portion of files than expected is detected.
Question: What was the file system on the drive you're trying to recover?
Does the drive contain anything right now when accessed via Windows Explorer? So IOW did whatever happened write new data to the drive?
Edit: NVM, I see now, completely blank.
" Recoverit, to EaseUS, Stellar,"
IMO these don't count as attempts. Granted they outperform Notepad when it comes to data recovery, but that's about it.
Recovery Explorer and more.
This is more relevant, too bad you leave out the 'more' part.
My question, would a data recovery service center have better luck recovering the data then all of the software I have tried?
Possibly, yes. Some of the better tools produce better results based on tweaking and choices offered during the recovery. A good data recovery tech knows the tweaks and best choices to pick. If however data was actually overwritten then no one can recover it. If file system structures were largely overwritten files detected may be largely due to raw signature scan. The latter will only detect file types it has signatures for which may explain why a smaller portion of files than expected is detected.
Question: What was the file system on the drive you're trying to recover?
Re: Question about recovering a formatted drive
August 13th, 2020, 20:12
Don't forget about TRIM being a major player with SMR drives...
What's the drive model?
pepe
What's the drive model?
pepe
Re: Question about recovering a formatted drive
August 14th, 2020, 12:29
pepe wrote:Don't forget about TRIM being a major player with SMR drives...
What's the drive model?
pepe
Model is Seagate Barracuda Pro 1TB. ST1000LM049-2GH172
Hard to tell it's odd since I have no idea what exactly happened. Ideally your first step now would be cloning it.
I have not cloned many drives in the past so I would need a bit of help on this.
Does the drive contain anything right now when accessed via Windows Explorer? So IOW did whatever happened write new data to the drive?
When the recovery was complete, the only thing in the drive was : $RECYCLE.BIN Which is empty
Question: What was the file system on the drive you're trying to recover?
Because the C: drive was limited in size, I would install most programs to the D Drive. Games like X Plane, Call of Duty, Adobe CS6, Sketchup, etc. As well I create scenery for X Plane so all creation files would be stored there such as models, textures, and such. No Windows system file structure was ever on the D drive. File system was NTFS on the D drive.
Re: Question about recovering a formatted drive
August 18th, 2020, 18:29
Just checking in on this for any further replies
Re: Question about recovering a formatted drive
August 25th, 2020, 12:19
Thought I would post this screenshot of the recovery process to see if there are any other people able to shed an answer on my original answer of if I would have better luck sending this drive in to be professionally recovered.
In the screenshot, I am using Recovery Explorer Professional and I am seeing a trend with any software I try showing the first parts of the recovery as seeing data (colored squares) then the rest of the drive coming up blank (grey squares) Naturally I know how data is written in terms of blocks, but there should be a lot more color squares considering the amount of data originally lost on this drive.
In the screenshot, I am using Recovery Explorer Professional and I am seeing a trend with any software I try showing the first parts of the recovery as seeing data (colored squares) then the rest of the drive coming up blank (grey squares) Naturally I know how data is written in terms of blocks, but there should be a lot more color squares considering the amount of data originally lost on this drive.
- Screenshot
Re: Question about recovering a formatted drive
August 25th, 2020, 19:42
I think it's an SMR drive, so data is probably TRIMMED. In which case file recovery software will get you no where.
https://skinflint.co.uk/seagate-barracu ... 62036.html
https://skinflint.co.uk/seagate-barracu ... 62036.html
Re: Question about recovering a formatted drive
September 1st, 2020, 13:24
"I went ahead and used the Recovery USB to reinstall windows and HP's software."
This was not a Windows re-install USB, rather it was HP's Recovery USB? If you were the creator of D partition, then HP returned the entire HDD to its original factory condition, one C partition. However, you are in a great place! There are many excellent data recovery company employees posting in here [I am not one of them
]
This was not a Windows re-install USB, rather it was HP's Recovery USB? If you were the creator of D partition, then HP returned the entire HDD to its original factory condition, one C partition. However, you are in a great place! There are many excellent data recovery company employees posting in here [I am not one of them
]
Re: Question about recovering a formatted drive
September 6th, 2020, 18:29
@ tdottrucker
Did you try opening the whole HDD in a hexadecimal editor like WinHex, and scroll down to see if there's actual data beyond the “colored squares” area, or if it's totally empty ? If it's all empty, whatever caused this, then noone will be able to recover anything from it (except perhaps God and/or Chuck Norris). If there's data all the way through the end, on the other hand, there may be some hope.
Did the softwares you tried do a filesystem scan only, or also a file signature search, also called “raw file carving” ? If the filesystem structures have been badly damaged in the process, more files could be recovered that way, with an unpredictable degree of reliability (for instance this method works poorly with fragmented files). I don't know about Recovery Explorer, but R-Studio has very good raw file detection abilities, as does the freeware Photorec (although it's less convenient as it extracts everything it finds on-the-fly in a single pass, it's not possible to check the result before selecting which files to extract).
Did you try opening the whole HDD in a hexadecimal editor like WinHex, and scroll down to see if there's actual data beyond the “colored squares” area, or if it's totally empty ? If it's all empty, whatever caused this, then noone will be able to recover anything from it (except perhaps God and/or Chuck Norris). If there's data all the way through the end, on the other hand, there may be some hope.
Did the softwares you tried do a filesystem scan only, or also a file signature search, also called “raw file carving” ? If the filesystem structures have been badly damaged in the process, more files could be recovered that way, with an unpredictable degree of reliability (for instance this method works poorly with fragmented files). I don't know about Recovery Explorer, but R-Studio has very good raw file detection abilities, as does the freeware Photorec (although it's less convenient as it extracts everything it finds on-the-fly in a single pass, it's not possible to check the result before selecting which files to extract).
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