free unformat software?

[DarkDraco]

had my external HDD hooked up to a laptop that had a sata drive that the windows installation cd couldnt detect. so i went and formatted my external hdd thinking its the internal one... now id like to recover my external, i cant find any free software, is there any? lol

[Omsion]

Don't believe so, unfortunetly.

[DarkDraco]

any that work thats not 500$?

[{PGA}AfterShock]

I used diskinternals partition recovery yesterday after accidently formatting the wrong drive after being ****ed off and in a hurry to reinstall vista after 2 dead sticks of crappy ocz ram corrupted my system files. After a lengthy scan I was shown a window with all my files and folder that were on that drive and lots of other stuff that I was glad to be able to get back. as long as you haven't used the drive since the wipe out you can most times get every single file back. this was the only data recovery program that I actually purchased before and it was easy to use and effective and found stuff that I wish I wouldn't have deleted in the 1st place.

[aja]

What filesystem was it before and after formatting?

Try these

http://www.overclockers.com.au/wiki/System_Utilities#Data_Recovery

[Charr]

You can use testdisk, it is a Linux utility that can recover deleted partitions.

[moto211]

I've used Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery software and it worked great. Not cheap or free though.

http://www.stellarinfo.com/disk-recovery.htm

[DarkDraco]

NTFS. Ill look into those. testdisk works on linux filesystems only?

[Jon]

You can use testdisk, it is a Linux utility that can recover deleted partitions.

This is the best I've used in extreme cases (as far as free goes).

[DarkDraco]

windows version of test disk doesnt work for me, just says theres nothing on that drive but shows everything on my other drives. i went to uninstall some of the demos i downloaded and suddenly i get a removable drive autoplay popup and my drive is back to the way it was before. idk what happen but im happy. either way id still like to have my hands on good software.

[Mizzery]

I've had good luck with PC Inspector in windows. I've used to get files off of drives with trashed sectors, mbr's, formatted etc. It can take some time to do a full scan, but if all you did was format it it should be able to help you at least save the files. I usually use this with whatever crashed drive hooked up with a usb adapter for ease of use. You can check it out http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/file_recovery/info.htm?language=1. Freeware.


Edit: I actually recommend people try this out just for the fun of it. If nothing - its a good hands on exercise on what is still on your disks after you delete it if you aren't running an eraser program to go over the actual file area. Its kinda fun to see what is left behind that you thought you could forget about.

[Mr.Guvernment]

R-Tools http://www.r-tt.com/

love this program and worth it, much better then most of the bloated commercial crap out there that sells for 5x as much!

[Charr]

NTFS. Ill look into those. testdisk works on linux filesystems only?

It works on any filesystem, but only works from Linux. It is command line only, so it might be hard to use. It comes with the System Rescue Disk, which you can get here:
http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page