[Help!] Recovering from a quick format?!

[jimbo_0002]

So today I was formatting an external drive to use as storage but in my rush to do it I wiped one of my 1tb Internal drives is there any chance of getting any of the data back from a quick format?

[Kilobyte]

Yes, there are a few options.

Essential key #1, do not plug in the drive until you are ready to recover the data. Anything that gets written to the drive reduces the ability to recover data.

Next, what type of data are we trying to recover? Many photos and mp3s can be recovered using a few free utilities, as they are usually within the limited size range.

Testdisk is an advanced utility which can royally screw up a drive, but can usually undo "quick formats". It is the primary reason I use it.

[D3matt]

Try Recuva. I've never personally used it, but I know professionals who swear by it. My prof once used it to recover an entire magazine issue an intern accidentally deleted. You should be able to recover almost everything as long as you haven't done any writing to the drive, as a quick format pretty much removes the index so the drive "appears" blank. The data is still very much intact as long as it hasn't been overwritten by new data.

[jimbo_0002]

Its an NTFS drive with mainly video files. Nothing has been written on the drive after it was formatted.

I'll check out recuva then thanks. Oh free software would be preferable to.

[C38368]

What they said.

All a quick format does is delete the partition table on a drive. The partition table can be thought of as analogous to the table of contents in a book, and it merely tells the OS where to look for files, not their actual composition or contents. Without a partition table, the drive will appear to operating systems as unformatted, even though the actual bit patterns for its contents are still there and in the proper order. A true full format will zero every bit on the drive, however, which annihilates any and all data present.

Also, and I don't recall the name offhand, but there is a Linux-based utility that will do what you want done off of any bootable disk (like a USB drive). Not sure if I can rebuild the partition table for you or not, but it will at least rescue the data. Great tool to have (even though I clearly don't!) now that the Linux kernel natively supports NTFS read and write operations.