Aborted a low level HD format process

whatamesswhatamess
edited August 2010 in Hardware
Hi I made a stupid mistake and started low level formatting an external (USB) hard drive using windows 7 starter thinking it was a small partition on the laptop drive (I couldn't see the contents on the drive using windows 7!). A few minutes into this process I realised I was formatting my external hard drive and pulled the USB plug. I plugged the external hard drive back into my old computer which uses vista and obviously I can't read this drive properly now (presumably because the partition is screwed up). I have read that the low level format process should take a while (and I was trying to format a terabyte HD) so is there any way I can rebuild and recover some to the data on this drive?

I actually downloaded HDD Recovery and tried the recovery option but after scanning a 32GB (not 931GB) partition, which I think is the external HD, it tried to build a tree strucutre and came up with a bunch of gobbledygook. I did see some documents and videos that I recognised but have not pressed recover as I can clearly see that it is a very small fraction of what I once had on the drive (I can only see a small fraction of the photos, word documents and media files, mind you I was using 680GB of the drive!) and I do not want to ruin any chances of possibly recovering a much greater proportion of the files.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!!

Comments

  • ardichokeardichoke Icrontian
    edited August 2010
    1st, I'm 99% sure you weren't doing a low level format. Last I checked Windows doesn't have a built in low level format tool. You would need to use something like Eraser or DBan in order to do a low level format.

    Now then, on to the recovery. First off, you may well not be able to recover some or all of your data. Might as well accept that one now. Especially since you unplugged the drive mid-format so who knows what that did to the particular portion of the drive it was formatting at that moment.

    There's a lot of software out there for recovering data from NTFS partitions. Most of it costs money. I've only worked with some of them, but I could never find a free tool for this that actually worked well. You might want to try these:

    http://www.diskinternals.com/ntfs-recovery/
    http://www.recovermyfiles.com/ntfs-fat-recovery-software.php

    Also, make absolutely sure that you're running the utilities on the correct drive, plus, as I said, unplugging mid-format could very well have screwed things up on the drive. You may be SOL. This is the exact reason you should always have backups of any data you don't want to lose.
  • whatamesswhatamess
    edited August 2010
    Thank you.

    Unfortunately I believe I did do a low level format - yes really stupid of me but I unchecked the quick format option, which according to windows 7, is 'a normal format which fully erases any existing data on the hard disk'.

    And yes it was stupid of me not to maintain two copies of critical files but I have just done a reinstall of my os on my old computer and hadn't copied those critical files back. I was actually in the process of copying files to my brand new computer when I accidently reformatted it.

    I did pull the plug only a few minutes in to the process. I've just tried the software you suggested and the recover my files program couldn't detect the drive, while the diskinternal program yielded the exact same result as HDD recovery, i.e. it detected a 32GB FAT drive and only seemed to find a few of my 680GB of files.

    I have also found a professional shop nearby which does data recovery
    - http://www.datarecoverydirect.co.uk/ - it is extremely expensive (between £540 and £1288 - that's US$800 - US$1900) to restore the drive. Even though the price is extortionate, I am actually contemplating doing this as I have a lot of personal photos and documents going back 10 years which have sentimental value.

    I was just wondering if anyone out there is an expert in HD formatting / recovery issues and may know whether a professional shop would be able to recover more than Diskinternal / HDD recovery - mind you they would take 5 days to look into it as well!
  • ardichokeardichoke Icrontian
    edited August 2010
    unchecking quick format is not the same as a low level format. An actual low level format actually writes zeroes to every bit on the drive and is completely irrecoverable. It takes hours and hours to complete and would leave your data, essentially, utterly irrecoverable.
  • whatamesswhatamess
    edited August 2010
    Thanks ardichoke.

    I went ahead and purchased a licence for HDD Recovery Pro 3.6. This program yielded identical results to Diskinternals Partition Recovery 3.7 and is exactly the same price at £111.76 so leads me to believe that it is actually the same program with a different interface.

    For both progams the lost file scan discovered the same number of folders (12 - I believe this corresponds to the folders in the root directory) and files (around 350k in total).

    Anyway I went ahead and tried to recover some of these files, I tried recovering the first folder (1531) first and got 10GB of files with strange names (for e.g. __A, ëRNTFS, fûTCPAu.$ù, fh._Sh, o.t__, ö.¢9É, ompresse.d & OOTMGR.s). Does anyone know what these files are?

    The other folders also contain files which aren't named properly so I haven't tried recovering them...

    I've attached screenshots explaining the above, would be grateful if anyone could make any sense of this.
  • ardichokeardichoke Icrontian
    edited August 2010
    Chances are, while you will be able to recover the data, the metadata (such as file names) won't be recoverable. This is because (at least iirc) a full format wipes out the file allocation tables which is where the actual names of the files are stored. You're probably going to be stuck recovering the data then determining what the files are and renaming them by hand.
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