The Hard drive which I have has NTFS file system. Due to some system problem I formatted the hard drive maintaining the same file system. Once the format completed, I realized that I hadn’t taken backup of important documents, which were the only copies I had on my hard drive. I am really worried about my lost documents. I really need those documents, as they are very important from my business point of view. Is there any way I can recover the documents lost due to formatting the drive?

Need not worry, though you have formatted your hard drive, you can perform formatted data recovery, provided they have not got overwritten by new data.

Why do we format a hard drive?

A brand new hard drive always requires formatting. By formatting, we divide the hard drive storage space into multiple tracks, sectors & clusters. The specification of track sector and clusters depends upon the file system & operating system, which we opt for. Various Windows file systems are FAT, FAT32, NTFS and NTFS5. All these file systems have its own properties, merits & demerits.

This might be the basic reason for formatting. Other than this, the other reason for which we choose to format our hard drives are the daily problems of an operating system like slow start, virus attack, system error, bad sector and many other problems. We usually think that formatting is the shortcut solution for every problem.

During the formatting process, we sometimes format the wrong drive or forget to backup the important files. We sometimes also format the whole drive, instead of formatting a single partition.

Caution

Stop using the hard drive immediately. Never save any data or install any software to the partition or drive from where you are recovering data, as it may result in overwriting of data, and would result in permanent data loss!!!

Process of recovering data lost due formatting

Use Remo Recover (Windows), an easy and secure way of performing formatted data recovery.

Accompanied by an on-screen “wizard”, you are guided through the data recovery process step by step. When all is accomplished you will be able to use the once-lost data just as before.

Follow the simple steps below to perform formatted data recovery from formatted NTFS drive:

Step 1: Start the Remo Recover Main application either from the Programs list in the Start Menu or by clicking the desktop shortcut. Click on Remo Recover – Advance option. Further select NTFS Partition Recovery. The application main window will be displayed as shown in figure a.

Figure a: Application Main Window

Step 2: Select the ‘Recover your Data’ option, and click on the ‘Next’ button to continue. As you click the ‘Next’ button, a window to select the physical drive from which data has to recovered, will be displayed. As you select the drive, you can see information of the selected drive, on right side of the window, as shown in Figure b.

Figure b: Select source disk

Step 3: Let the processing mode be set to default i.e., Display default partitions. As you click on the ‘Next’ button, the application analyzes the drive, and lists all the found partitions in the partition table as shown in Figure c.

Figure c: Partition Table

Step 4: Select the formatted partition, from which data has to be recovered. Once partition is selected, click the Finish button. NTFS Partition Recovery analyzes the selected logical drive and searches for files and folders in it.

While NTFS Partition Recovery searches for files and folders, process information is displayed at the bottom of the main application window panel and actions are recorded in the process log on the application main window.

After searching for files and folders, all found files and folders will be displayed in a tree format, as shown in Figure d.

Figure d: Found files and folders

Step 5: Once the tree is formed, the final step is to restore data to a safe location. Select the folders you wish to save, and click the Save button. If you want to recover the whole tree structure that has been formed, click the root folder to mark whole data and click the ‘Save All’ option on the tool bar or button from the tools menu.

As soon as you click on the ‘Save all’ button, a window to select the destination drive is displayed, as shown in Figure e.

Figure e: Select destination drive

Select a logical drive in your local disk where you wish to save the data, and click the OK button. This will save the selected file/folder to specified destination drive.

Note:

• If you do not find your files and folders in the tree structure formed, then run the Turbo scan option from the Tools menu. In this operation, the application performs rigorous search to find files and folders and will list all the found files and folders.
• You can preview the file before it could be recovered, by using the Preview option.
• If you do not want to save data now but do it later, then you can save the scanned information in a file, by using the ‘Save Scan Information’ option in Tools menu. You can open scan info file whenever required using the ‘Open Scan Information’ option in the File menu, and recover data to a desired destination drive. This reduces the pain of scanning the whole drive again for lost / deleted data.

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