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accidental disk format. please help!

luv2liv

luv2liv

Diamond Member
I often use "Win32 Disk Imager" to write IMG file to the raspberry pi SD card, usually on F drive.

today i goofed up and chose the G drive, which is my ext usb back up drive. immediately after 3 seconds, i realized i chose the WRONG drive, i hit the cancel button. but it was too late (i think). the drive's name "extra drive" is still there. but i cannot access the drive. Windows 7 wants me to format the drive.
is there any way i can recover the drive with every documents in it? thanks!

error looks something like this
You-need-to-format-the-disk.jpg


when i hit Cancel, i get:
G:\ is not accessible.
The volume does not contain a recognized file system....
 
C1 said:
Easeus as I recall is techniclly not free. It is trial and allows free recovery of 1GB limit.

Eassos claims it can handle unformatting and that it is available freeware.
http://www.eassos.com/blog/how-to-unformat-a-hard-drive-in-windows-10-8-7/

I would attempt to analyze the disk using "TestDisk" which is known freeware. Just go slowly. If I recall correctly, it should have an option to repair, replace or rebuild the MFT.
Click to expand...

is this the TestDisk that you mentioned? https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download
 
Ya, that's one of the files I have. In the past Ive successfully used the older version 6.14 for disk repair (eg, both data recovery as well as repair/restore of disk redered to RAW).

"TestDisk" is a well known and respected freeware. It's a bit criptic which is probably an argument against it, but just go slow (ie, read thoroughly the data screens for the options available at each major step).

When TestDisk scans/analyses, it does not write or do damage to the HDD files. Before anything is attempted to be written or modified on the affected media, TestDisk will warn you.
 
i booted up today with the USB drive connected. for whatever reason, i can open the drive but it is only partial and none of the files i can recognize from before this mess.


bwA9tjh.jpg


in Windows Explorer, the drive shows up as FAT 41.5 MB free of 55.9MB.
I know for sure it was NTFS. total 4TB, with about 80GB free space left . using TestDisk now with Deep Search. will update once is it done 100%. right now it is still stuck at 00% as seen in screenshot above
 
I have used file scavenger before. It saved my butt more than once 😳
It can read from unallocated disk space
Give it a try.
 
i went ahead and format the unallocated disk space to NTFS. then used Recuva to recover.
i think Recuva recovered all the files. BUT the names are nonsense. example: tax2009.xlsx would look like 49382.xlsx. and for whatever reason, some file names are fine. the full 4TB ext hard drive took about 20hrs to recover about 2TB, I did not bother recovering all the data.

luckily i use backblaze.com ($5 per month for unlimited backup) to back up to their cloud service. they charge $190 to send me the hard drive with everything, it was via Fedex 2 biz day delivery. backblaze will refund if i send their drive back within 30 days. so all i have to do is pay about $10 to ship their drive back.
 
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