Please help... accidently formatted the wrong drive during W7 install. :(

[DrewSG3]

I know it sounds stupid, but I been doing this all my life and never had a problem where I accidently formatted a hard drive. Now I just lost all my important documents, pictures, and other stuff 🙁

What can I do now? I haven't written over it, but it seems like I may have to because the W7 install seems to be hanging on my other hard drive.

But what are my best options?

 

[EarthwormJim]

The data is still there as long as you haven't written anything to the drive.

I've used zar before to recover data on a partition that was accidentally reformatted.

Do you have a spare computer to do this on?

 

[DrewSG3]

No, right now I'm posting from my palm pre :\

 

[theevilsharpie]

I've you've JUST formatted the drive, you should be able to use a program like GetDataBack to recover the data.

I've you've formatted the drive and installed Windows, you may be able to recover the data if you're lucky.

BTW, you may want to reserve some of your computer upgrade budget for a backup system if you haven't already.

 

[RebateMonger]

Change in the default behavior of the format command in Windows Vista:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941961

Don't know what type of format you used, but if it wasn't a "Quick Format", then it may have written zeros across the entire drive.

Always disconnect any disks not needed during an OS install.

Edit: Looks like the Win7 Installer is hard coded to do a "Quick Format". Lucky for you.

 

[VirtualLarry]

If it were an SSD that supports TRIM, then the info would have been lost forever, as even Win7's quick format sends a TRIM command for all of those sectors, so the SSD de-allocates those pages internally, without any easy way to recover.

 

[Idontcare]

I recently had a fubared master file table (not same as MBR) and could not recover my files.

Then for $20 I bought this and had all my data back within about 3 hrs (for 500MB) http://www.restorer-ultimate.com/download.shtml

I'm sure there are equivalent performing products to be had for even less, I just wanted to say that this particular products works as advertised.

The cool thing is you can try it for free and it will show you what files, if any, it will be able to extract for you from the drive in question before you have to buy it. So you know in advance it is going to work before you pay.

One thing though is that it can only copy the recovered files to another hard-drive, you must then reformat the original drive and move the files back yourself. It doesn't restore the files by undeleting them in their place. Wasn't an issue for me as I had plenty of extra drives lying around.