Help! Accidentally deleted and formatted my storage drive!

armysgt1

armysgt1

Member
I was doing a clean install of windows 7 and I accidentally hit delete on the wrong drive and also formatted it. I'm running windows great, as the drive I deleted was pictures, movies, etc., but important things i cannot get back. The drive does show up in device manager and in my bios. Also I ran the evaluation version of Hdd recovery pro to see if the data was still on there, and thank God, its all there. I just don't want to dish out $50 or more to recover it if I don't have to. I was also wondering if it were possible to go into disk management in the device manager and create a simple volume on the drive and choose not to format it? If anyone can help me I would greatly appreciate it.
 
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Thank you very much. I just read somewhere else that testdisk has worked for some people also. If one of these doesn't work the first try, it wont corrupt anything, correct?
 
no it wont corrupt anything, the files you deleted are they on a totally seperate hard drive as the os, or same drive but different partion ?
 
no it will be totally safe just dont load anything else into the drive until you have done the recovery or you might overwrite some files, run all the free recovery tools you can find, but start with recuva its very good, it will take hours if you do a full scan for all file types, just leave it to run until its finished, you will get alot of rubbishy extras like icons and all that, when its done just recover everything, then you will have to sort through which files are yours that you want to keep.
 
When i run these programs though, will I be able to open the drive in windows and view my files just as I had before?
 
armysgt1 said:
When i run these programs though, will I be able to open the drive in windows and view my files just as I had before?
Click to expand...

yes but what you will have to is set your drive backup, it will recover the raw files like mp3, jpeg, mp4 etc, not folders they were in, so when the recoverys finished, open the drive you had them in and replace the folders you had them in like documents, pictures, music, videos, software etc, then subfolders like in pictures for example, my holiday etc.
 
before you run the recovery it will let you select an output destination, just make a folder called my recovered files and put it somewhere there is enough drive space to hold all the files you had, if possible not on the drive you formatted
 
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