How to recover formatted external drive

[tyndallit]

An employee accidentally reformatted an Seagate external hard drive that contains pictures and documents. Luckily I was able to get the drive before anything new was copied or written to it. Before turning it over to a Data Recovery company, I'm trying to recover the contents myself. I've downloaded and tried several programs to use their trial before buying, but not getting the results I need. I can see the documents but am not able to open some. Can anyone recommend a good product, or is my best bet to contact a data recovery specialist?

 

[xit]

1st thing, if this data is very, very important, quit trying to do this yourself & have it professionally done. If in fact it is not so important, then buy a good recovery program and go after what you may or may not recover. Chances are either way some data will be recovered, some not so much after the drive was formatted.

 

[hairlessupportmonkey]

hirens Boot CD will help here.

http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

It contains free / freeware / opensource apps on a single boot CD

Download it from Here

Burn to a CD and boot from it.

Good luck

Recovery Tools
DataRescue DD 1.0 DrDD is a disk imager intended for data recovery and backup of partially corrupted storage devices, the main advantages are Range Selection and Copy Backward Direction.
DiskDigger 0.8.3.176 Undelete and recover lost photos, videos, music, documents and other formats from your hard drive, memory cards and USB flash drives.
DiskGenius 3.2 Restore deleted partition, Rebuild MBR, Rebuild partition table, Recover files, Restore formatted partition, Backup files by partition, Disk clone, Backup partition table, Create/Delete/Format Partitions etc.
IsoBuster 3.0 CD/DVD/Blu-ray and Disk Image File data recovery tool that can read and extract files, tracks and sessions from CD-i, VCD, SVCD, CD-ROM, CD-ROM XA, DVD, DVCD BD and HD DVD and other media as well as a wide variety of disk image formats, it also has retry-mechanisms for damaged CD/DVD.
Partition Find and Mount 2.31 Partition Find and Mount software is designed to find lost or deleted partitions.
PartitionRecovery 1.0 A freeware tool to recover accidentally deleted partitions.
PhotoRec 6.14b Tool to Recover File and pictures from Dos/Windows/Linux.
Recuva 1.43.623 Restore deleted files from Hard Drive, Digital Camera Memory Card, usb mp3 player etc.
Restoration 3.2.13 A tool to recover deleted files.
ShadowExplorer 0.8 Shadow Explorer allows you to browse the shadow copies created by the Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service and retrieve older versions from files you accidentally deleted or altered.
Smart Partition Recovery 3.3 Find Lost NTFS partitions and restore them back.
SoftPerfect File Recovery 1.2 Restore accidentally deleted files from hard drive, USB flash drives, CF and SD memory cards.
TestDisk 6.14b Tool to check and undelete partition from Dos/Windows/Linux.
TrID File Identifier 2.10 Alternative of UnChk and FileChk to recover filetype from the file content.
Unstoppable Copier 5.2 Allows you to copy files from disks with problems such as bad sectors, scratches or that just give errors when reading data.

ACSS - SME
General Geek

 

[goombawaho]

GetDataBack for NTFS. Trial version allows you to SEE what you can get back.

http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

The advice about the importance of the data and doing it yourself is absolutely correct. If you're fiddling about with that drive and do anything wrong (like writing to the drive in any way), you could lose data permanently.
I don't agree that formatting will NECESSARILY hurt any of the data. It should all be there unless other things have been done to the drive. Tread carefully.

If it's extremely important data (your job or employee job on the line), I wouldn't fool around with it because I don't feel that you have enough experience in doing this type of task. If the data is less important, have at it, but keep the CYA situation in mind.

 

[rclarke250]

I've had very good luck using Easus partition recovery, found here. And it is free to recover partitions from accidental formatting.

 

[tyndallit]

Many thanks for the advice. It looks like anything we do on our own is time-consuming with mixed results. I'm taking the advice of sending the drive to a professional data recovery company. The errant employee will pay all or some of the cost.
Again, thanks to all for your input.

 

[goombawaho]

You know that technically the company should be responsible for paying 100% of the recovery because they were "dumb" enough to have an external hard drive that was NOT BEING BACKED UP. Employees are people and people make mistakes. But IT people are supposed to plan for those mistakes by managing risk. Backup is one form of managing risk. An un-backed up hard drive is a risk.

Sorry, but I have to call it like I see it. Forcing the employee to pay for data recovery seems pretty odious to me. Plus, if you had more skills as an IT person, it would not be necessary to send the drive out.

 

[goombawaho]

Sorry if that was a bit harsh - too much coffee or actually too strong ////// >>> \\\\\ power surge in my brain.