Formatting question.

[Sovereign]

My friend formatted his hard drive. He recently contacted me wishing to know if there was any way to retrieve some of his old data....

Well, is there? Thanks for the help ahead of time.

[D3V]

Not that I know of. There are a few types of Formatting a hd. But I personally don't know how to get data back after it is deleted. (But when it is deleted it isn't actually wiped completely off, it is just pushed out of the way, and gradually it will be written over, but until then I'm not sure how'd you get it back)

Depending on the format, I doubt it.

[‡AC‡]

How did he formatt it? Good ole C:/ formatt or did he use a windows installing disc?

[BlueCube]

Wasn't there an old DOS command called Unformat? Of course, I bet it would depend on whether the disk was formatted in FAT32 or NTFS.

[‡AC‡]

There was no "un-format" DOS command, but if he had used a windows cd to format, it would of as d3v said push back the data. If the HDD was allready in the correct format for the OS being installed. There are programs out there that can find this pushed back data but they are hard to find.

[kockblocker1]

If he formated it with the new windows install than I would say his data is pretty much toast. It is possible he could get some or perhaps a good deal of what he wanted to but the process would be expensive to get someone else to do it and it would be very time consuming if he tried to do it himself. Best thing to do is just say fuck it and move on, its just not worth it.

[‡AC‡]

If he formated it with the new windows install than I would say his data is pretty much toast. It is possible he could get some or perhaps a good deal of what he wanted to but the process would be expensive to get someone else to do it and it would be very time consuming if he tried to do it himself. Best thing to do is just say fuck it and move on, its just not worth it.
Ditto .

[WetWired]

You can use Norton Utilities to retrieve data, depending on how the disk was formatted, but since the file system is overwritten during all formatting processes, you can only retrieve:
Files that were contiguous on the hard disk (unless you defragged before the last access to the file, not very likely), and not in the root directory--this is done by searching for the file name in the old subdirectory records then looking at the indicated starting cluster. Since the FAT is toast, if the file is not contingous, there's no telling where the other fragments are
Files that are mainly textual in nature (word processing documents)--you can search for text you know appears in various fragments and piece them together.
A quick format overwrites the FAT and root directory.
If you repartitioned, 1 sector in each track is toast as well.
A full format (takes hour+ for most drives these days) erases everything.
Also, in the case of NTFS, I know nothing.

[kockblocker1]

To go along with what Wetwired said,

If you went:
Fat to NTFS data = Definate toast
Fat to Fat (I don't know why anyone would do this though) data = Maybe
NTFS to NTFS data = more than 90% posiblity toast.

[D3V]

What does he need to get back that was on his old installation?

[Chruser]

Yeah, formatting makes things more difficult. If he had simply DELETED most of his files directly from, say, Windows, he'd had a much better chance at restoring just about everything. The files really remain until they become overwritten by new data, and "deleting" them does not delete them. Heh.

[BlueCube]

There was no "un-format" DOS command

o rly

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;69767

Though it appears that it required the old DOS format command, so it could save the data for it to restore from. Don't know if Windows saves any pre-format data..

[D3V]

Yeah, but that was back in like Win 3.1.

[-Spector-]

thats why he said "OLD" dos command