HELP! External Hard Drive Erased

[cleary71]

Can anyone please help me. I was reformatting my computer and I have an external hard drive attached and the computer must have thought that it was the D drive and completely erased everything. Please tell me there is some way of recovering it. I am not holding out hope, but I can't bare to think that all my files are gone.

[fdv]

Make yourself a UBCD4WIN and use some of the NTFS Undelete utilities on it.

I hasten to tell you the obvious: do not use the drive until the exact moment you're ready to start recovering files.

[pcalvert]

If all you did was format the drive, then there's a good chance you can get your data back. Whatever you do, though, do not write anything to that drive.

Phil

P.S. Will be back with more info later.

[neo]

Try Pheonix Data Recovery !

I will recover definitly !...

[cleary71]

What actually happen, and I have no clue how, was the when I went to reformat and reinstall windows xp it did it on my external hard drive. It made two drives and wrote a copy of windows on one 16 GB drive and just erased the rest of the other 134 GB and wrote a few files. Thank for the advice I will try them now.

Edited May 11, 2008 by cleary71

[cleary71]

Every program I use only gives me the files that are currently on there, not the ones that are lost.

[DigeratiPrime]

you need to do a full sector scan of the disk to discover files and folders since the file allocation table is destroyed.

Try Recuva (freeware), which in the latest build added "Deep Scan" (Options>Advanced) support for recovering files from formatted drives.

http://www.recuva.com/

If that does not work try R-Studio, its not free but it hasnt failed me yet.

http://www.r-studio.com/

[neo]

just give a try to Phoenix data recovery tool....

[yronnen]

I managed to erase an external HDD myself not long ago, and I've used GetDataBack to restore the files. I managed to restore almost everything (you need another HDD to restore the files to, you cannot restore files to the deleted HDD).

This is not a free program, but you can download a trial version here:

http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

[joe43wv]

When recovering data I use RecoverSoft Data Rescue PC V2.0. It's a free download from the website.

http://www.recoversoft.com/download.htm

The only thing is the scanner part is free. If you want to recover anything you have to purchase a license. The free scanner works great, it can scan for folders or or by sectors. It even has a preview feature so you can view word docs. etc. before having to purchase the software. I highly recommend it, easy and works great!