Unformat a Formated Hard Drive ????

[Motaro]

Unformat a Formated Hard Drive ????

Can this be done ?

If so, What software ?

Drive is Fat 32 formated before and after....

Thanks

 

[Scorpion]

Unformat? Don't think so, but you can delete the partition, which is essentially the same thing, because whatever is on that partition will be gone for good.

Just use fdisk.exe to unpartition.

 

[Ben]

I assume by "unformat" you mean to recover the data?

If that's what your trying to do, deleting the partition would NOT be a good thing to do.

 

[pyr]

if you do want to recover something you formatted over, try Lost and Found (I think by Powerquest tho I might be wrong). it works really well, and allowed me to recover a lot of stuff after a drive got nuked.

 

[Strafe]

on a related subject, does anyone know what format c: /u actually does? I think that a normal format is supposed to contain some recovery information and the /u means unrecoverable. Whats that all about?

 

[Budman]

The U in format c:/u is for Unconditional , it does not retain bad sector information.

 

[Mark R]

DOS and, I think, Win95 had an unformat command which would restore data destroyed by a format. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with FAT32.

You need to try a data recovery program - Lost and found, as mentioned earlier, is OK.
But you absolutely must not save or install anything to the drive. If you have saved anything or installed anything on the drive since it was formatted, you can kiss goodbye to most of the contents.

Finally, an unconditional format does nothing to bad sectors - if windows has saved a list of bad sectors, then that list will remain untouched. All /U does, is prevent format from asking 'Are you sure?'. This is useful, if you are using a boot disk, which must run without user intervention.

 

[medic]

Try Directory Snoop

 

[Modus]

CRV, where do you dig up all this stuff? I think there was a thread months ago where I decided that your archives of obscure computer related knowledge would be the modern equivalent of the Lost Library of Alexandria

Modus

 

[medic]

hehe.. I remember that thread!

(just hit 16,000 Favorites) :Q

 

[ArkAoss]

16,000 favs? woah
yeah directory snoop is good, if you can install it on another hard drive with an os
i think their is an unformat switch, but try /? to get the switches