Format Recovery - Need help

J

jbfoster

New Member
I have two USB externals drives. One is my backup drive. The other I just bought and was formating it to NTFS. The full format was taking a long time so I aborted the format and used the quick format. Everything went fine.

I then went to copy some stuff to the backup drive but it said it was not formated. My heart stopped then I said a few choice words. :eek: All my pictures for the last 1.5 years is on there. I could not do anything to the drive until I format, so I went ahead and did a quick formate. I am using Vista and the FAT32 option was not there so I formated to NTFS. I think the drive came formated to FAT32. I have no idea how the backup drive got formated. I guess I must of done something. Since the format I have not written anything to the hard drive.

I got a program form Diskinternals. It took about 4 hours to scan. It found around 350gig. It then took another 4 or so hours to copy to my new drive. All the files were corrupted.

Now for my questions:

1. Can the data still be recovered if the drive was FAT32 and then formated to NTFS?

2. Would it help if I formated it back to FAT32?

3. What would be the best software to try to recover my data?

4. Any other thoughts or ideas?



Thanks
Jim
 
I got a program from Ontrack called Easyrecovery. It found most of my files. I was worried mostly about my pictures. Looks like most if not all of the pictures were recovered.

Not all programs will work. Pandora did not work. I forget the others I tried. I deleted them already. Ontrack took 5 hours to scan my 500gig hard drive. The drive was not full. I think I had about 300gig on it.

The software will not let you copy the files to the same hard drive that you are recovering from so you don't over write data you are trying to recover. The hard drive that I was recovering and the hard drive that I was copying to is two differnt external USB drives plugged in the USB ports. What was weird was when I went to copy the files, the software said that I was trying to copy the files to the same partition. I wasn't. I was using two different hard drives. One was F: drive and the other was G: drive. Maybe that's how the drive got formated. As I said in my first post all I was doing was formating my new 1TB USB drive and when I was done my 500GB USB drive was also formated. From now on if I need to format I will just plug in the one USB drive so the other does not get formated.


Thanks for all the help.

Jim
 
S.T.A.R.S. said:
Converting NTFS back to FAT32 is NOT recommended because it will result in losing data!!!
Click to expand...

futurelao said:
the first thing you should do is to stop putting any new data before recovery.
Be cautious to choose formatting.
I used Wondershare Data Recovery to get back all my data with nice quality.
It's a comprehensive data recovery tool which can perform Deleted Recovery, Formatted Recovery, RAW Recovery and Partition Recovery.
also it can recover photos.
learn detailed data recovery tips to get your data with nice quality.
Click to expand...

Guys, this thread is almost a year old. Look at dates before posting.
 
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