Data recovery software or tools for a formatted hard disk!
Data recovery software or tools for a formatted hard disk!
Recently couple of months back, I have formatted my comp’s hard disk and later realised that I had some important files on the formatted disk which are lost. I have searched for data recovery tools online but most of them I could get were of trail version. It was then that one of my friends told me about Recuva a free data recovery tool. This is the first time I have used a data recovery tool and it worked successfully for me. I was able to recover all my files from the formatted hard disk. I then started exploring more about such free data recovery tools and unbelievably I could find plenty of them, and probably because my google search techniques improved a lot!
During my hunt for the recovery tools, I have come across many forums saying that you cannot retrieve the data from a formatted hard disk most of the times unless you are lucky enough to get through, but I strongly feel against it. After my first data recovery experience two months back, I have come across same kind of issues with few of my neighbours and friends hard disks. I started using the free and powerful data recovery tools and I was able to recover all their data back and it was only once that I couldn’t recover some of the files as they were in a bad state and were unreadable.
Lemme all tell you some juicy stuff here, usually formatting a hard disk does not erase the data present on it, but instead just deletes the references to all files on the disk. Any file system that maintains inode tables which contain information about location of a file on the hard disk, which sector? which block? etc…and formatting this hard disk will only delete these inode entries and creates a new file system on the hard disk. That is the reason you cannot access data from your Operating System after the hard disk is formatted since you do not have any references to them.
The data recovery tools are designed to read this over-written inode/file system information and scans through the entire disk partition to get the information about which file existed where on the hard disk before it being formatted. However we have advanced data wiping tools which rewrite the entire disk partition with a fixed format of hexadecimal code in which case it becomes impossible to read any previous data on the disk.
Trivia: DOS’ FORMAT command writes the hexadecimal code ‘F6′ to every data sector on the disk during the format operation.
I am sure that by following the below steps you should be able to recover all your data back from a formatted hard disk:
1. As soon as you realise that you have to recover the data from a formatted hard disk, stop using it for any of your activities and place it aside safely. The less you have used the formatted hard disk, the more becomes the chances for you to recover complete data in good format. This is because when you keep using the formatted hard disk, the disk re-writes new information into different areas of your hard disk in which case the data recovery tools may not be able to recognise the over written files and shall not retrieve the required data.
2. Never install the data recovery software on the disk/partition that you want to recover data from unless the software specifically recommends you to do so. This is because the data recovery software tries to read and restructure the deleted inode information for the files and will face difficulties if it is running on the same hard disk on which the “needs to be reocovered” data exists.
Let me talk about Recuva which was the first data recovery tool I used and I am glad that it still stands the best among that I have come across:
- You can download Recuva from www.recuva.com
- Install this tool on a different different hard disk/partition other than the one you wanna recover data from.
- Connect the formatted hard disk as an external drive.
- Open the Recuva tool Wizard from Start->Programs.
- You can specify the type of files Pictures, Music, Documents, Video or other type of files that needs to be recovered.
- You can select a specific location from which you are trying to recover data from or select the entire drive. Note: Narrowing your search location will lower the time taken to recover files. You can also say that you are not sure about the location so that the software scans the entire list of drives on your machines.
- Select Start scan button to start scanning for recoverable files. You can enable the “deep scan” option if you not able to find the files you are looking for with the simple scan. Note that deep scan might take few hours depending on the disk size.
Recovery with Recuva
- Above is a sample picture of the files listed by software. The red ball indicates that the file is in bad condition and will not be able to recover the file in readable format. Green ball indicates that the file can be successfully retrieved. You also yellow ball (not shown in the picture) which indicates that the file is partiatlly recoverable.
- The ‘info’ tab on the right side gived the inode information for the selected file eg: Creation time etc.
- If you remenber the file name or part of the file name that you wanna recover you can quickly find it by putting it in the search box.
- Select the files by ticking the check box for the files and click on Recover button to start recovering them. You will be asked to specify a location to save these recovered files during the recovery process.
Other options with the tool:
- The view of files can be changed to either Tree mode or thumbnail mode. Tree mode makes it easy for you to browse to the specific folder under C:\ drive and also recover selected folders at once. Please find a sample pictures below:
You are also provided with some advanded options like selecting hidden files from Options->Action tab.
There are also a list of other free data recovery tools along with their download links as mentioned below. The procedure for installing and using any other data recovery tool will mostly be similar to the one explained above.
- - File Recovery: http://www.softwarepatch.com/software/filerecovery.html
- - PC inspector: http://download.pcinspector.de/pci_filerecovery.exe
- - Panda Recovery: http://www.pandorarecovery.com/bin/PandoraRecovery.exe
- - Data Recovery: http://tokiwa.qee.jp/EN/DataRecovery_EN.zip
Hope you find this article informative and you have a successful data recovery, in case you are trying to. Please do let us know your experience (with any other tools?) in the comments section. 