My unallocated external hard drive was accidentally formatted using my laptop?

Question

My operating system is Windows 7 64 Bit
My external hard drive brand is iomega with iomega encryption and it was unallocated space.

I accidentally formatted my hard drive and all my files are gone. I used some tool to change the unallocated space to allocated and it was formatted again.

Can i recover my files from my hard drive that I formatted twice?

There are lot of important things inside and I want to recover it. Please help me to save all my files and back to normal.

Give me some precautions to avoid failures and permanent deletion of my files.

Thanks.

RONALD ALLAN PETER CALICA

Answer 1

You might be able to 'undo' the format using this software:

http://www.easeus.com/partition-recovery/



Otherwise, Recuva is one of the your better remaining options.



(Your question is a bit confusing. Did all of this happen only on the external drive? How did you save to unallocated space, or was it allocated before?)

Answer 2

There are a few free data recovery programs around.

On I have tried and found effective i Recuva.

download from http://www.piriform.com/recuva/download or



http://download.cnet.com/Recuva/3000-2242_4-10753287.html



run with the wizard in deep scan and recover the data to another output device as you do not want to possibly over write the data you are recovering.

The only thing worrying me is you say the data may be encrypted so may be a problem. when recovered write back to original drive

As for your other answer completely wrong. The data is still there until overwritten.

Answer 3

First, do not to write any new data to the hard drive.

then use data recovery software like Card Data Recovery to help you. it can recover data from formatted hard drive.

Install the program to other storage device, not the hard drive and then lanuch it and scan the hard drive. you can see all your files displayed in the task list. Click "preview" to check your files and then click "recovery" to get back them.

More detailed info, you can search Card Data Recovery in Google to get into its official website.

Answer 4

I am afraid to say that you lost those files completely. Whenever you format a HDD, files contained on it are deleted.