Recover data on PC drive reformatted by Mac.

[SvenSvenson]

Hi,

A friend of mine moved all her photos from her laptop onto and external hard drive - I don't know if it was formatted as FAT32 or NTFS. her husband then reformatted it on his Mac.

Can anyone recommend the best way to try to recover the data, either with a PC or Mac tool? I don't know how much the drive has been used since the format.

It's the photos of her kids, so it's pretty important.

Thanks,

Steve

 

[Fishrrman]

"A friend of mine moved all her photos from her laptop onto and external hard drive - I don't know if it was formatted as FAT32 or NTFS. her husband then reformatted it on his Mac.
Can anyone recommend the best way to try to recover the data, either with a PC or Mac tool? I don't know how much the drive has been used since the format."

Since the drive is already Mac-formatted, I suggest you try something called "PhotoRescue" on it.

Google to locate it.

The way it works is like this:
1. You can download the app for free
2. Once you have it, you run it and let it scan the problem drive
3. If it is able to locate the missing files, it will present them to you in a list.
4. You then pay the registration fee, get a user ID, enter the ID, and the program will recover the files.

IMPORTANT IMPORTANT IMPORTANT
You WILL need a "recovery drive" IN ADDITION TO the "problem" drive.

You CANNOT "recover" the files from the "problem" (re-initialized) drive "to itself". You MUST have another, free drive where the scavenged files can be stored.

Also
You will probably lose all pre-existing folder hierarchies and quite possibly many of the file names as well. But the data files will be there. Such are the travails of file recovery.

Other similar apps to consider:
DataRescue3
Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery
DiskDrill
(the ALL work the same way as PhotoRescue does - you "try before you buy")

And...
Next time, tell her to have a "backup of the backup" -- TWO drives for the important photos, and
... for better marital relations, her husband should keep his hands off her drive -- and VICE VERSA

 

[Sirolway]

I found TestDisk from cgsecurity to be pretty good

It's command line, so not as convenient as some, but recovered data off an unknown-format NAS disk with no problem at all