Data Recovery Question / Formatting

[Toby Goodbar]

i have a hard drive that began as a formatted win NTFS drive, which i formatted with hfs a couple of times to do some hackintosh experimenting. apparently i missed one of the document folders that were important to me when i did the backup to a bigger drive of the windows files.

i am looking into data recovery software but i don't know much about it. the format has changed, and it has been formatted a couple of times. is it still possbile to use data recovery software and are there any recommendations?


if anyone feels i have a better chance getting this answered in a different part of the forum, let me know.... thanx guys!

 

[GGJstudios]

Formatting typically destroys all data on the drive being formatted, so you're out of luck.

 

[Toby Goodbar]

Formatting typically destroys all data on the drive being formatted, so you're out of luck.

thats how i understood it but apparently there is software that can retrieve it. even if partitions are gone or reformatting has occured. ive been trying to gain info on different companies websites. it makes sense if you think about it. quick format options, 7-pass formatting, etc....

 

[GGJstudios]

thats how i understood it but apparently there is software that can retrieve it. even if partitions are gone or reformatting has occured. ive been trying to gain info on different companies websites. it makes sense if you think about it. quick format options, 7-pass formatting, etc....

Data recovery software can't recover data if it's been written over. It only works if the data is intact and only the indexes are removed. Once you overwrite data, it's unrecoverable. Unless the formatting processes were specifically configured to not overwrite data, you won't recover anything.

 

[Guiyon]

Doing a format usually does not destroy data unless you also perform a zero all data, random data write, etc on it. It destroys all references to the data, yes, but the data is usually still there. Assuming you run data recovery software immediately after a format you can usually get a decent chunk of data back. In your case, forget about it. If the drive has been through several format and install cycles you have probably already overwritten the data there is a slim to none chance of recovering anything but gibberish off of it.

 

[Toby Goodbar]

Doing a format usually does not destroy data unless you also perform a zero all data, random data write, etc on it. It destroys all references to the data, yes, but the data is usually still there. Assuming you run data recovery software immediately after a format you can usually get a decent chunk of data back. In your case, forget about it. If the drive has been through several format and install cycles you have probably already overwritten the data there is a slim to none chance of recovering anything but gibberish off of it.

thats what i was afraid of. especially considering a 9 gig install on a 30 gig hd. pretty hopeless hunh?