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I have a harddisk with two partitions: one for windows and one for data. I've reinstalled windows on the first partition and formatted the data partition with full format (without /Q option) making sure that all my data is backed up. After that I've created the same folder structure (without files inside) on data partition as it was before formatting.
I then realized that all my photos were NOT backed up :((((
I've tried several tools to recover my data without any success:
- Wordershare Photo Recovery
- Active File Recovery
- R-Studio
- PhotoRec from CGSecurity
- Recuva
There are max 50Mb of new data on that partition, so data overwriting is minimal.
What is the reason why I'm not able to recover my data with data recovery tools: full format or same folder structure?
And... can I get my photos back or they are lost forever?
possible duplicate of Free NTFS partition recovery
– Sathyajith Bhat – 2010-08-26T21:27:39.650Full format was used... that's a destructive format, overwriting every sector, I imagine it took quite a while to finish too. I'm afraid there's little that can be done. Had a /Q uick format been used, the data would still be in the sectors, just 'unlinked' in a sense, and quite reasonably recovered with the myriad of tools suggested. Full format wipes the drive, non-recoverable without majorly expensive systems and tools. – lornix – 2010-11-06T20:17:58.453
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Windows Long format does write to sector 0 and MFT, but not the rest of the drive, it only reads all sectors, a surface scan....http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302686
– Moab – 2011-02-10T20:12:29.030That may be true in XP, but it is different in Windows 7. 7 zero writes the sectors (when a full format is done). OP didn't provide OS info, I don't believe. If W7 & if full format, I believe the OP is out of luck. – therube – 2011-03-04T04:44:24.387