Recover from formatted disk?

[Cpmiller22]

Hi all-

I have an issue I'm hoping someone might be able to help me with. I accidentally took a 4tb seagate drive that was formatted with ntfs in my windows 7 box and put it in my netgear readynas. I then formatted it as a single volume. After I did all this I realized that I put the wrong drive in my nas (doh!) that still had data I need on it. I did not put any data on it, and immediately removed it from the nas.

I have put the drive in a drive caddy and ran the easeUS software against it. After waiting about 24 hours it shows data on the drive, but it's showing data from the new nas partition (only about 3gb). Is there any way to recover the data from the old ntfs partition that was in there?

Any help would be much appreciated!

[labtech]

Possible, however it really depends on how much has been overwritten by the new format. Likely the file structure won't be retained, some corruption.
Plus, likely you will need better software than easus.

[Cpmiller22]

Possible, however it really depends on how much has been overwritten by the new format. Likely the file structure won't be retained, some corruption.
Plus, likely you will need better software than easus.

Thanks for the response. It looks like there is only 3.5gb of data written on the 4tb drive so I was hopeful not everything was lost. I may even have some of this data backed up, but I really need to at least see a list of what was on the drive to confirm what was on it. Any suggestions on what software I should consider trying next?

Thanks!

[Dmitri]

you will need better software than easus.

what software I should consider trying next?

UFS Explorer.
Formatted file systems: chances for recovery -- http://www.ufsexplorer.com/und_fmt.php

[Kum Ruzvelt]

U can try R-Studio too.
Some NAS drives when initialize hard drives, overwrite empty space with 0's. Open you hdd in HEX editor and check it.
Do you use NTFS or EXT on NAS.

[hhddrec]

U can try R-Studio too.
Some NAS drives when initialize hard drives, overwrite empty space with 0's. Open you hdd in HEX editor and check it.
Do you use NTFS or EXT on NAS.

this is very good advice
Try to open your drive with winhex (for example)
if your drive is fulled by 0,s nothing to do.

if not try with R-Studio or UFS, god tool for data recovery in those cases.

[Cpmiller22]

Thanks for the tips so far. I downloaded R-Studio and did an initial scan on the drive. I've attached a screenshot of the initial results. You can see the 4TB drive that is listed and it shows 3 volumes and an empty space item. Volume 1 and 3 seem to show as ext filesystem, but the volume I'm looking to recover the partition I had when it was in my windows 7 system. I'm 99% certain it was formatted as NTFS. I'm not an expert in this space so any additional tips/thoughts on next steps would be great. I think like 70% of the data on the drive was backed up, so my first goal is to simply get a list of what was on it. From there I can decide how much additional effort I should put into further recovery.

Thanks!

Attachments

[Alt(R-TT)]

Thanks for the tips so far. I downloaded R-Studio and did an initial scan on the drive. I've attached a screenshot of the initial results.

I'm not sure this is a screenshot of R-Studio. At least, I've never seen such its panels.

[Cpmiller22]

Thanks for the tips so far. I downloaded R-Studio and did an initial scan on the drive. I've attached a screenshot of the initial results.

I'm not sure this is a screenshot of R-Studio. At least, I've never seen such its panels.

Many appologies on posting the wrong screenshot! here ks the correct r-studio screenshot:

Attachments

[Cpmiller22]

Thanks for the tips so far. I downloaded R-Studio and did an initial scan on the drive. I've attached a screenshot of the initial results.

I'm not sure this is a screenshot of R-Studio. At least, I've never seen such its panels.

I'm sorry, I somehow managed to post the wrong screenshot!

Here is the screenshot from R-Studio:

Attachments

[labtech]

Based on the formatting circumstances, it looks as expected.

Pretty confident you will not be able to see the original file structure as the "metadata" responsible for doing so likely has been overwritten.

If lucky, can get some data only in RAW format. Loose files sorted by type.

[Cpmiller22]

Based on the formatting circumstances, it looks as expected.

Pretty confident you will not be able to see the original file structure as the "metadata" responsible for doing so likely has been overwritten.

If lucky, can get some data only in RAW format. Loose files sorted by type.

How would I go about looking at the data in RAW format?

[loki]

Hi Cpmiller22,

If you right click the drive in R-Studio & then choose Scan.
Click the Scan button.
It will then scan the drive sector by sector.
Once the scan is complete you can sort by Extensions tab

Loki

[Alt(R-TT)]

I'd still look at the drive content to check that the drive hasn't been 0-ed. Right-click the drive in R-Studio and select View/Edit.
Usually some NTFS remnants remain even after a disk format, and there's none on the screenshot.

[hhddrec]

yes, you maybe can get RAW files but without file estructure system.

Good luck!

[Cpmiller22]

Thanks for all the advice. I couldn't find any ntfs bits anywhere, so it looks like I'm out of luck. Luckily for me I think I have almost all of the data backed up elsewhere.

[databack]

In some cases I use DC file explorer from SalvationData
50% I have a successful cases