HELP! Please help with post-format recovery!

Hello all. I was in the midst of formatting the final hard drive in my plan to consolidate all my data to a better HD when I had second guesses of whether or not I had recovered a particular folder in the pre-formatted HD's directories. I immediately turned off the PC about 20 something percent through the formatting process. Then, I booted from the emergency HD I keep on hand and did a massive sweep of a search through all three HD's hooked up. The search results yielded to no avail my precious files that I evidently overlooked to back-up. Are there any programs out there that can recover my files, and is there even hope for me?! Thanks in advance.

http://lifehacker.com/393084/how-to-recover-deleted-files-with-free-software

A guide to recover deleted files using free software. Although I'm not sure how a computer goes about reformatting a disk, if all it did was delete the reference in the MFT, but not overwrite your data, then it should be easily recoverable.

do not write to the drive again. You can use the recovery tools to try to get your data. Regular formatting does not write over the blocks, so you should be fine if that is all you did.

Here is also what I've done: Repartition the HD with a third party program and then reboot to format with the XP install disc. I'm wondering if the fact that I canceled the formatting during its process might mess anything up in the recovery. I haven't been able to pull up any other partition other the one I created afterward. What sorts of programs do you all recommend?

Get Data Back for NTFS is well worth the $$$ it costs. http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm
It will be able to find what you are looking for and is easy to use. And it has a Demo to make sure before you buy.

Know Nuttin said:

do not write to the drive again. You can use the recovery tools to try to get your data. Regular formatting does not write over the blocks, so you should be fine if that is all you did.

Click to expand...

True, whatever you do...
DO NOT WRITE TO THE HARD DRIVE AT ALL!!!!
^This is soooo important!!!

Pntgrd said:

Get Data Back for NTFS is well worth the $$$ it costs. http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm
It will be able to find what you are looking for and is easy to use. And it has a Demo to make sure before you buy.

Click to expand...

I've used GBD and let me tell you I've done some serious recoveries with it.

One time I did EXACTLY what you did, except it went through the full format.

I did a format, and then I used GBD and did a 100% full recovery.

I don't think stopping it @ 20% was harmful... in my opinion.
KEEP US POSTED!!

g0dM@n said:

I don't think stopping it @ 20% was harmful... in my opinion.
KEEP US POSTED!!

Click to expand...

I don't believe it did anything either, other than mess up the partition index/table info and the data allocation info. I have used GDB as well as others and they work well but again, the key thing being no data being written to the drive at all.

You can use GetDataBack and another of their products called Raid Reconstructor to recover a borked Raid array. I lost one whole stripe on a Matrix setup once and got it all back. I thought that was just pretty COOL.

SWEET! I tried GDB, and the files are there! But now I gotta fork over 80 bucks just to save them?

Thanks for the help everyone!

You could try "recuva", it is free.