Recovering Data from a reformatted HDD

[uscz1]

I have a I/O Magic removable HDD that crapped out on me after moving all of my pictures to it...as a back up! Well my PC crashed and then I tried to recover when my removable HDD also went out.

 

So I took the IDE Drive out of its enclosure and plugged it into my PC. The PC did not recognize the drive so I created a new partition which ended up reformating the drive.

 

I was expecting my data to be recoverable, but it does not appear to be there. I downloaded Recuva and it did not see anything in the HDD.

 

I was told that if you reformat the drive the data would still be there, but the address labels would be delted.

 

I need some help!

Thanks,

 

T

[Augeas]

I believe that Recuva reads the entries in the MFT with the delete flag set on, and then follows the CCHHRR (or whatever these disks use) to find the relevant file. So if the MFT has been reformatted then the old files will not be findable with this method, even if they still physically exist on the disk. Furthermore Recuva specifically looks for deleted files, and your files have not been deleted as far as I can tell.

 

Recuva (and I guess most, if not all, commonly available file recovery programs) can't read the entire disk and return the info to the user. Well, they could, but they would have to return every 32k sector, and that's over 30,000 sectors in 1gb, so there would be an awfully long list, without file names and without filetype info. Commercial file recovery firms do have the software to do this, so you could have a chat with your local pc shop, and see what they say.

 

Unless someone else has a whizzo idea. Rgds.