Sherdog Tech Support: GF Formatted External HD; 3 Years' Work Lost

[YukisHeart]

My girlfriend is an amateur photographer; just passed her interviews for college after saving up for years.

However, a couple of days ago her laptop broke, and last night I came home to find her in floods of tears. She had her photos backed up onto an external hard drive, but when she tried to upload them to a friend's computer a box popped up telling her she had to format the disk before it could be used, and she OK'd it.

She didn't just lose a portfolio she spent three years creating, she also lost all her pictures from our holidays; photos of her family back home in Europe; etc.

I had hoped a simple program like Recuva might be able to salvage something, but after plugging the external HD into my laptop I'm getting the same message (that it needs to be formatted) she did at first.

When I try to search the drive with Recuva anyway, it just comes up with a message saying it can't carry out the scan because it's is unable to determine the file type.

Any help here would be greatly appreciated. I'm sure there must be something that could be done, since the authorities regularly "undelete" files on old disks when they're running prosecutions.

 

[Thunderflash500]

Lol. Obviously captain hindsight, but if something is important don't keep it all in one location. And then format it lol. Good luck getting it back though.

 

[Kiddo716]

it's the universes way of telling her not to leave the kitchen. consider it a favor.

 

[Rob Battisti]

There is nothing to be done dude. Let her learn from this. Never keep electronic data only in one spot.

 

[Rob Battisti]

Any help here would be greatly appreciated. I'm sure there must be something that could be done, since the authorities regularly "undelete" files on old disks when they're running prosecutions.

Its not that the files were 'deleted' the drive was reformatted. To my best knowledge there is nothing that can be done. This nearly happened to all of my work as well. The then GF at the time was trying to upload stuff on to my drive and I caught her before she did the same thing.

 

[Cherdawg]

Tell the government you have encrypted files concerning wall street trading that went down during 9/11. They will get everything off it for you.
You might get in trouble for lying though.

 

[KOCowboy]

but her an ipad

 

[KaNesDeath]

Need to take it to a specialist to do a recovery. Fragmentations of files still may exist on the drive.

 

[INeedARemedy]

There is nothing to be done dude. Let her learn from this. Never keep electronic data only in one spot.

You'd be amazed how much data you can retrieve. I personally am not the one to talk to, but Google is. There are several free programs out there that can help get you your data back

 

[Jack Reacheround]

There is some very expensive forensic software out there that can recover the data. I don't know what it is though. But basically, formatting the drive writes over all the data by putting all the ferromagnetic material on the drive in one position. The forensic software can go through the drive, and determine by the lean of that material which way it was originally facing, 0 or 1. It then re-writes the drive accordingly.

 

[Wrath621]

Last time that happened to me I sued software called File Scavenger and it worked great.

 

[thechoice2]

Did she have them on her laptop? If the laptop that went bad doesn't have a bad harddrive, take the harddrive out of it and see if you can get it to be recognized in another computer.

 

[method115]

That sucks bad my media center pops up with this prompt occasionally on my USB drive and I have to replug it in. I always thought that was a very misleading prompt and very irresponsible of Microsoft to put that on the screen. Normal users should not be able to format a drive so quickly. If that prompt never came up she would have just replugged it in and then everything would be fine.

 

[BoogerDawson]

Maybe a rescue CD with a linux distro may help. You can download a puppy linux iso, burn the iso to a CD, boot your computer with the CD, mount the external HD and see if it can read the files. Then, if you're lucky, you can transfer the files to another media.

 

[Nick Kilian]

I have successfully recovered a HD that was reformatted. As long as it didn't write over the 1s and 0s, it's still there. I think A quick format option just says this block of data can be used and doesn't actually overwrite it with blank space.

This was so long ago so I don't remember the program. It will cost money but I think a demo of the program would scan it and show if it's still there.

 

[Satanical Eve]

Do not write any new data to the external hard drive. Like some others have said you can still retrieve the previous information. A quick format will not cause the existing data to be lost. The data itself is still there BUT inaccessible by normal means. The moment you start putting files and what not onto the newly formatted drive is when you will fuck yourself over and start overwriting and fragmenting files.

There is some free software like Recuvia that can help in recovering lost data

 

[RoryFan]

You're pretty much fucked I'm afraid buddy.

As stated above you can take it to an expensive specialist and spend a few hundred bucks to get back some pixelated photos, but your best bet is to spend the money on alcohol or a beginners I.T. class.

 

[Satanical Eve]

Ah I see you used Recuva. Stellar Phoenix is considered one of the best if not the best recovery software out there. It is however $50 bucks

 

[CarbonFistprint]

photorec.

 

[AdamL]

Do not write any new data to the external hard drive. Like some others have said you can still retrieve the previous information. A quick format will not cause the existing data to be lost. The data itself is still there BUT inaccessible by normal means. The moment you start putting files and what not onto the newly formatted drive is when you will fuck yourself over and start overwriting and fragmenting files.

There is some free software like Recuvia that can help in recovering lost data

This. A quick format doesn't actually write over any old data. It just deletes the existing journal and writes out a new one that's blank. Recovery apps can scour the drive and rebuild the journal, IF you don't start writing new data to the drive. You can still recover some files if you do write to the drive, but chances are you're going to start losing the old files. The more that's over-written, the less you can recover.