Re-formatted hard drive question?

Question

My Brother just emailed me with this: He wanted to reformat the drives on his laptop. He backed-up all of his music/photo etc. files to an external drive, BUT left the external drive connected when he reformatted. The system, of course, with his blessing --- because he forgot to disconnect the drive -- reformatted ALL of the drives including the external one (This is how he explained it to me, so if something does not sound right, I won't be able to explain it). So the obvious question is: is he completely hosed, or can he unformat the drive somehow. In the old days, we used Norton Utilities for such a thing, but I have no idea what's out there at the moment and, therefore, have nothing to recommend to him. Thanks for reading this. Any constructive advice will be appreciated and passed on to my Bro. Regards.

Answer 1

There are a number of unlimited programs out there. Getdataback seems to be the preferred program to use:


GetDataBack for FAT
GetDataBack will help you retrieve your files if the hard drive's partition table, boot record, FAT, or root directory have been damaged by a virus, formatting, fdisk or power failure. GetDataBack can even recover your data when the drive is no longer recognized by Windows.

GetDataBack for NTFS
Recover your files when the data is no longer accessible due to formatting, fdisk, virus attack, power or software failure. Get everything back even when the drive's partition table, boot record, Master File Table or root directory is lost or corrupt.
Hard Drives
Partitions
Floppy Drives
Drive Images
Zip/Jaz Drives
http://www.runtime.org/

Answer 2

Format File Recovery

Data Recovery Wizard FormatRecovery is the most comprehensive file unformat software for Windows.

Data Recovery Wizard Format File Recovery can search for formatted partition on any version of Windows including - Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows 2003 Server and Windows XP.

Key Features:
Data Recovery Wizard Format File Recovery can recover data in following cases:

Unformat partition from hard drives formatted on FAT 16, FAT 32, and NTFS & NTFS 5 file systems.
Recover files & folders formatted through Windows Command Line or from DOS.
Recover files & folders formatted through disk manager tool, such as Super Fdisk, Partition Magic.
Support localized and long filenames.

Data Recovery Wizard Format File Recovery can recover data from various File types and storage media including:

Hard Drives
Zip Disks
Digital camera cards
USB Drives
Any other storage device whose drive letter is displayed in Windows "My computer".

http://www.easeus.com/resource/format-file-recovery.htm

Answer 3

You neglected to state wich os was used to format.
No matter. I doubt the format did all the drives or you would have received an error when it tried to format the cd and failed.
also, the external drive would only be compatible with windows, format is low level, there would not be any drivers to operate it. Either he failed to correctly copy the files or the current format and the drive are incompatible.
NTFS (xp) will recognize FAT (98), but FAT will not recognize NTFS.

Answer 4

I've never heard of being able to format more than one drive at a time... anyway, there are programs you can buy that will attempt to recover a drive. Try, Norton Partition Magic by Symantec. Not guaranteed to work, but, it's worth a try.

Answer 5

Smells like BS.

Most USBMS drive will:
1.) not mount on boot unless you say so
2.) drive will not format itself.
3.) install will only choose 1 phys drive to cook
4.) it was not you.
5.) data recovery MAY find some things.