How do i undo formatting on my external hard drive that i formatted by mistake erasing all my media?

Question

i just erased my external hard drive by formatting the wrong drive.....isnt there a dos command to undo formatting...so i can get back my media that took years to collect

Answer 1

Try this, I am not sure how this will work in XP, but perhaps if you have a DOS-Floppy you can boot from. The most important things ist to not add anything to the external so that the old files aren't overwritten:http://www.csulb.edu/~murdock/unformat.html

Here are some programs you might try as well:http://www.downloadjunction.com/product/software/5547

Answer 2

Sorry buddy, but odds are your data is lost. There is hope, though. You can buy a data recovery program (about $20) and try using that. The most important thing though if you are going to attemp data recovery is DO NOT EDIT YOUR HARD DRIVE! Don't delete anythign, don't save anythign to it, the best thing to do would be to unplug it for now so you don't do anything. Data recovery work becase when you hit delete it doesn't actually esare that part of your hard disk, only the allocation table for it. So, try data recovery, although I'm not sure it works with formatting..maybe someone else can help me out on that part. Sorry bout the loss, though! Done similar things myself and know how much it hurts.

Answer 3

Yes with the help of data recovery software you can recover the data. Recuva and Testdisk are example of two good and free data recovery tools. I personally recovered around 80 GB of data with the help of recuva. But first of all you must stop using the external drive any more and don't save any new data to it. Download and install data recovery software and then connect the external drive to the system and scan the drive.

Answer 4

This is one URL. Just google unformat drive and it will give you a list of other sites. Now if you go this route, you have to pay. BUT some let you peek inside. Reason is, that for example, you have no files over 64 Mb then no use getting the program that will handle larger files.

Answer 5

Ha... ya cain't .. it's all gone. Although you might be able to pay a specialist a couple of thousands of $s to retrieve some of the stuff for you, it is not something that most people could do without very specialized equipment.

Answer 6

There are data extraction services, but they don't come cheap and they can't promise results.

Its not much fun, but computers are a learning experience.

Answer 7

you can't undo formatting, however you can try to recover files using recuva

Answer 8

Nope. It's gone.

Answer 9

file scavenger is a great program.

Answer 10

sorry not that I know of, that's why it warns you that you are doing a destructive recovery