I accidentally reformatted my 2TB external HD while trying to make a bootable usb for a friend who had his PC fail on him. We downloaded a wizard from the web and even though we dropped down to the USB flash drive there was some crossed wires and the wizard started a reformat of my 2TB seagate HD with all my data on. I didn't even realise what had happened until afterwards, although I did stop the reformt well before it was completed.

One of the problems is that the file system the drive originally had was set up to NTFS and the reformat was to FAT32 so while I think that all or most of my files are still on the disk they are unreadable. The drive itself shows up and a local drive G in My Computer and in Disk Management is shows as Drive G and RAW.

The drive is about 1 year old and is fine apart from the reformat, it hasn't been dropped and so far none of the tools I have used on it have had any problems accessing or scanning the drive also no bad sectors are flaging up. I ran seagate tools on the drive not long before this happened and the drive showed a pass on the test.

So far I have ran icare data recovery which did find a lot of raw unnamed files but at that point I was still hopeful I could get my old file directories back along with the data so I decided to try some other software. I then ran TestDisk which was unable to find any partition and then I ran GetDataBack for NTFS which seemed to detect many files but only found one $MFT with 4 entries after some reading around this I believe this is the MFT mirror file which is only a back up of the MFT and other related files and cannot recreate the file structure itself. When GDB was extracting this I could see all my file names whizzing by but all prefixed with "index info not added filename=" then the name of the file. I believe GDB was detecting the files as it was finding many during the scan and showing them with their HEX code but no files at all showed up after the software was unable to recreate my file tree.

I am now running Zero Assumption Recovery which still has about 6 hours to go, it seems to be going well but obviously it is hard to tell until the scan completes.

What I would like to know is considering the fact that my external Hard drive has been reformatted to FAT32 from NTFS what are my chances of a full recovery including the original file directories and names? If not do I have a good chance of recovering my data in a raw state, I have not saved anything to this drive since this happened last thursday. I did go out and get another 2TB drive to save my data to if I am successful in getting it back. What is the best software for raw recovery, will it save the file with the correct extention i.e. .avi, .mobi etc?

If all I can hope for onmy own with my limited understanding is a recovery of raw files then would a professional data recovery service be able to get my data back with the file and folder names intact? If so considering that my MFT info looks to be lost would this be prohibitively expensive? I couldn't pay more than £200 for this kind of service.

If I do have to do a raw recovery what advice is there for going through and reordering the files and getting them into some kind of order? I know that I would have to cut my losses with probably a large chunk of my files but what about files like avi files, pdfs, MSdocs, ebook formats, is there even a data recovery software that can find ebook files? Would i just be able to open them and see what it was and rename it or is it more complex than that?

I did last month just get a Bluray burner for backing up but had only got though a small amount of my data and then this happened. I had been super careful with that drive so it just goes to show you how something awful like this can happen so easily.

Anyway any advice at all on this would be great, ideally I'd love to recover all my data with the original names but if you think this just isn't going to happen then please tell me so I can get on with a raw recovery and the monster task of sorting it all out.

Kind regards,

Celine

For your information I have just completed the scan with Zero Assumption Recovery and while it seemed to identify lots of blocks of data it identified the drive as having a FAT32 file system and all it only brought up four files which were all unimportant. This is not the four it lets you save on the free program, four was all it found.

I would be so grateful if someone could give me some advice on this, I was sure at least raw files would be recoverd perhaps I need a specialist software for this process?

I am feeling very low now and unsure what to try next any help would be wonderful.

Thank you in adavance.

convert FAT32 to NTFS. it will leave the data intact. as long as its the quick version. then u can run regular NTFS recoveries.

So if I reformat the Drive back to NTFS I will be able to get my data back? Would it be safer if I made an image of the disk and then did this?

Thank you for this glimmer of hope!

Try R-Studio ,
Do not do any write operations on the drive(format or convert files system etc) , leave it in the same condition, you can try other methods later to recover from it or if you want to send it to DR, it is best to give it in this condition.
R-Studio identifies all known formats and this might be of help in finding your old NTFS structure , You may lose the Root Directroy Structure, but other files should be got properly(if there was no fragmentation before).
There are other tools to target specific types of files, like pictures,songs,etc. you can try them later if you have to recover only these.

im not sure image will help since it will depend on the data that is accessible. unless u did a complete clone which will preserve the data. But as long as you never do a "full format" data will always be recoverable.
if you are going to do a full clone. i think this seems like the right tool to make a back up.

http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-Raw-Copy-Tool/

Thank you, I will go to bed and get some sleep before I try this and will let you know if it works, I am just very nervous about doing anything to the original drive.

Thanks again.

Thank you I will try R-Studio, hopefully something will work!

I meant R-Studio recovery, not imaging.
Imaging would be required if there was some bad sectors on the drive and the recovery scan was stopping or taking too long and degrading the drive.
But imaging is good because the original failed condition of the drive can be maintained for other purposes,as you can work with the clone.
But you will need two Hard disks of similar or larger capicity ,for that purpose, one for the clone and another to copy the data from the cloned drive(because we will not use the original drive until all the data is satisfactorily got)

good luck

Yes I will try with RStudio to recover my data, as far as I can tell the drive is healthy, not bad sectors etc. I also wonder what do you think of EASEUS Data Recovery software is that good or do you need to specify the file system?

I would start by cloning your drive, sector by sector, to a second drive of equal or larger capacity. Then put aside the original drive and work on the clone.

You say that you saw your original file names whizzing by, so this would suggest that you did a quick format rather than a full format. In this case I would think that only the beginning of the user area would have been overwritten. Therefore you would still have a good chance of recovering any data beyond that point, if only as raw files without the original directory structure.

To help your data recovery software do its job, and to prevent it from being confused by a bogus FAT32 file system, I would determine which sectors were overwritten and then fill them will zeros.

The next thing would be to use a disc editor to locate the backup NTFS boot sector at the end of the drive, and then copy it to the appropriate sector at the start of the drive. I would then use the information in the boot sector to reconstruct the partition table in sector 0 (assuming the partition is an MBR type).

After preparing the drive as outlined above, I would then let your data recovery software do its work.

Otherwise, if you're looking for a non-interactive, single-click solution, then try R-Studio.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Another vote for r-studio.

What you can do is run the demo version of r-studio. This will crunch through your disk (will take several hours) and then you can see a list of files, including directory structure, of what could be recovered. The demo version even allows you to look at previews of certain files (pdf, jpg, ...)

Once you are satisfied that the list of files is correct, buy a license, and enter the license code in r-studio, and you are recovering.

I recently had friend whose hard disk failed completely. I tries EaseUS and other tools, and none of them could provide any help (you can read about it here: successfull-recovery-t24393.html). R-studio recovered nearly everything perfectly. The files that couldn't be recovered were due to bad sectors.

Your disk does not have bad sectors. It just has a logical problem (formatted partition). Your data should still be on the drive, and should be recoverable. Try r-studio (no, I'm not affiliated with it).