I was trying to format my external drive and accidentally ran a quick format on the wrong Hard Drive (Internal drive). The system does not boot. Is there anyway to recover data from a quick formatted hard drive?

Quick format just removes the file pointers, and marks the space occupied by the file, as available for use. It involves deleting the file table entry,and making the file inaccessible, but the actual data still exists on the hard drive until new data is saved. A quick format is the easiest to recover data from, provided, the data is not overwritten by new one.

The software that best suits such a situation is REMO Recover (Windows) Basic Edition. The software is designed to retrieve deleted / lost files, even if they are deleted from the Recycle Bin. This software uses advanced techniques to locate the deleted files and restores them back to a safe location.

There are some precautions that you need to take, before performing data recovery. They can be listed as shown below,

• For successful recovery of lost files and folders, make sure that you do not perform any read/write operations on the formatted drive.

• Download and install  REMO Recover (Windows) Basic Edition software, on another system, and attach the formatted drive as a slave to that system.We will use this system,to recover data from the formatted drive.

Tutorial on how to recover files after quick format using REMO Recover (Windows) Basic Edition.

Follow the simple steps given below, to successfully recover, all the deleted/lost files from the formatted drive.

Step 1: Launch REMO Recover (Windows) Basic Edition either by selecting the icon from the Programs list in the Start Menu,or by double clicking the desktop shortcut. The Main window pops up as shown in Figure a.

Four options are displayed in this window: Recover Deleted Data, Recover Lost File, Recover Photo,and  Recover – Advanced.

Figure a: Main window

Step 2: Click on the Recover Deleted Data option.As soon as you click the Recover Deleted Data option, a new window is displayed as shown in Figure b.The window displays all the logical drives connected to the system.

Select the  formatted drive and click on the Next button.

Note: If the logical drive you are looking for, is not displayed in the list of logical drives, then use the  Search lost partitions option, to find your lost partition (logical drive) and proceed with the recovery process.

Figure b: Select logical drive

Step 3: As you click the Next button, the application scans the selected drive for lost/deleted data, and lists all the found files and folders in a tree format under the Root folder, as shown in Figure c.

Figure c: Found files and folders

Step 4: Once recovery is complete, and the tree structure is formed, the next and final step is to restore the files and folders that have been found, into a safe destination drive.

Here,you can use,

• The Find option by clicking the button,to locate the file, or types of files you wish to recover, by entering the filename or the file extension. For e.g. filename.* or *.txt .

OR

• The Find Next option can be used after the Find option, by clicking the  button, to locate subsequent files with the same file extension, in the selected folders, that form a part of the tree structure. You can also use the Preview function to preview the file, before it is recovered, as shown in Figure d.

Figure d: Preview

NOTE: In the Preview function,all files, other than the image files would be displayed in ASCII format.

Step 5:The next and final step is to restore your found files and folders to a safe location. Click the file you wish to recover and click on the Save button. As you click the Save button, a window to select the destination drive, to restore the recovered data, is displayed, as shown in Figure e.

Figure e: Select destination drive

Select the destination drive, and specify the file types you wish to ignore (file filter) while saving. If you want the data to be saved in a compressed format, select the Compress Data option, and click the OK button.

As you click the OK button, the application starts saving the data to the selected destination drive. Once saving is complete, a message pops up intimating the same. All the data will be saved into a new folder by name “UndeleteX” in the selected destination drive. You can now access your recovered data as before.

Note: The Save option is disabled in the Demo Version of the software. You can only Preview the recovered files in the Demo Version. The Save option gets enabled, once you buy the Full Version. Buy Now!

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