I made a mistake and delete partitions and quickformatted an old drive. I now want to restore the partitions to recover some files which I missed.
The disk in question was formatted as FAT32 on its primary partition, either FAT32/NTFS on the other 2 logical or extended partitions so 3 partitions in total. All 3 partitions were deleted under Win7 and a new single partition created and quickformatted under under NTFS. Big problem is that I have no idea on the exact sizes of the original 3 partitions.
Any tips on recovery software?
EaseUs, and virtually all other recovery software publishers, offer "free" software versions of their product. Unfortunately, that "free" software will at best allow you to recover only a very limited amount of data, or to only be able to view data that the software has detected. If you want to actually recover your data you have to buy a license.
Easeus Data Recovery Wizard + Data Recovery Wizard WinPE costs $90.00. The "free" version is limited to recovering one GB of data. If you don't think you have more than one GB of data on three partitions, there's a chance the "free" version might work.
I'm not finding fault with EaseUs or anyone's software. They're in business to make money, not to give away the fully functional version of their products. That $90.00 price tag is well within the price range for licensed recovery software, regardless of the publisher.
There are many well regarded data recovery software publishers, as a quick Google search will show, who's products are capable of recovering data from a formatted partition. The only question you need to answer is what is your data worth to you.
Tips:
- Regardless of which software you decide on, read the Users Manual until you fully understand the procedures. Why do you think commercial data recovery shops charge so much for their services?
- Don't write anymore data to that disk, unplug it. The longer that drive remains operational the less your chances become of recovering any data.
- Prepare a separate drive to be used for writing the recovered data to. Never try to write recovered data to the same drive that the data you're trying to recover is located on.
- Choose a recovery software that creates a bootable disk (WinPE, Linux). Don't try to recover data from within the Windows environment.
- Best practice is to write an image of the drive to be recovered, to the separate drive you prepared previously, using that feature of the recovery software. That way if you screw up the first time out, you've only screwed up an image. You still have all your original data intact so you can try it again.
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