hard drive recovery after low-level reformat

05
2014-04
  • frenchie

    I've reformatted my hard drive and reinstalled Windows but nothing else. I've looked at several hard drive recovery options and many say they can recover data after reformatting but the reformat I did was a low-level reformat, not the quick format. Is it technically possible to recover files after a low-level reformat?

    Thanks

    • Answers
  • c0dev

    Technically ( for example for security companies with special tools), it's maybe possible to recover data. But for a normal user: No, it's not possible.

    Don't worry. Normal users aren't able to recover the data.


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  • Josh Stodola

    I tried to boot up a relatively old computer and it would always blue screen at the Windows XP splash loading part. I thought something could just be wrong with the board because it was old so I swapped out the drive into a much newer board with better wires. Same issue. All the Hirens boot disc utilities I used to try to read the drive treated it as if it was unformatted. I was able to run a Data Rescue DD on it completely though, despite consistent read errors throughout the entire drive. So now I have a ~186GB .dd file on an external drive of mine, and I have no idea how to salvage anything from it. I am hopeful, but I can't seem to find anything online about these types of files.

    I am preparing to try TestDisk on this file shortly (making a backup first!). I'll let you know how it turns out.

    Any suggestions on how to recover any data from this drive would be greatly appreciated! It is not mission-critical, and I have no intentions of spending money to pay some expert to analyze it.


    • Related Answers
  • Majenko

    What you have there is a raw disk image file - a file based representation of the entire hard drive.

    It can be mounted easily under Linux, but for Windows you need special software.

    A bit of hunting lead me to this software: ImDisk

    It allows you to mount the image as a virtual drive in Windows and access it as if it were a real hard drive.

    I have never used it, so can't vouch for it, but it looks like it should work.