Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Oops, I formatted the wrong drive

It's one of those moments, you're reinstalling Windows and you're looking at the list of partitions and drives and you're sure you're looking at the right drive and partition and you select format. Then all of the sudden, it hits you, OOPS, WRONG DRIVE. Angry expletives follow.

Rules to follow so that you don't do format the WRONG drive, there's only one that I follow:
  • If possible (because some computers, especially laptops, have drives that may not be easily accessible), ALWAYS disconnect any drive that you don't unintentionally want to format.
Assuming you did what you didn't intend to do, we move on to RECOVERY or unformat.

So yes, I DIDN'T follow my own rule and YES, I did format the WRONG DRIVE. Still upset about really. But what's done is done and trying to recover was very trying experience.

The drive I formatted was a 1 TB Western Digital SATA HDD.

Software I tried:

So I'll cut to the chase and I didn't have patience to take screenshots. With both Kroll Ontrack EasyRecovery and EaseUS Data Recovery, after 10 hours (1 TB recovery) the software didn't find my formatted data. Instead it found everything else! Strangely enough if you interrupted the process early, it did find an unidentified partition with my data in it, but it wasn't accessible.

Remo Recovery hung after about 1 hour into the process.

R-TT R-Studio did the BEST job. It found most of my files. It didn't find my large image (ISO) files or hordes of installation executables, etc. It did find files I never had on the drive but on a different system. I guess this goes to show, don't mess around with a formatted drive too much. Use the best software available and recover everything you can as quickly as possible.

If you accidentally formatted your drive. Sorry and Good Luck. Hope this helped.
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