File recovery from a formatted drive

July 10, 2007 12:18 PM

How can I recover a file from an accidentally quick-formated laptop?

The laptop (HP) wouldn't boot, so I used a Knoppix CD to copy Documents and Settings to a USB drive before examining HP's provided recovery options. While I did so, the tool somewhat unexpectedly formatted the drive and reinstalled Windows XP. I thought it wasn't a problem, until the one important Word file turned out not to be found under Documents and Settings. The formatting procedure didn't take more than a minute or two, so the drive clearly wasn't wiped. I have some hope that the Windows installation didn't overwrite this particular file, but I don't know what to do to get it back.

What programs should I try? Is there anything available for free?

Since I'd prefer not to boot from this drive, is it possible to make a Windows bootable USB with enough drivers to get the computer started, or should I open the case and take the drive out? Or is it ok to boot from it as long as I only run programs from the external drive?

If your suggestion is Linux based, detailed suggestions are highly appreciated, as I know very little of it. Thanks in advance!

posted by springload to computers & internet (8 comments total)

If you can put the old partition layout back in place, you should be able to see all the files that were present under it. I once accidentally quick-formatted my company's file server, and this tool saved my ass.

You'd want to boot Knoppix again, or possibly look for another Linux CD distro like it that might include the gpart utility, and run it against the drive in question. Here's one. Gpart will try to determine what the old partition map was by examining the disk block by block, and then will give you the option to restore that map to the drive again. You'd then be able to mount the drive and browse it as you did when you first tried Knoppix. Assuming you know where the file in question is, since it wasn't under Documents and Settings, just locate it, copy it off, and go from there.

Heck, you could probably start over with HP's Windows recovery tools after this point, and be more careful not to let it format and reinstall Windows for you : )
posted by autojack at 12:45 PM on July 10, 2007

R-Studio works, but it's not free. It takes forever to scan the drive, but it seemed to do a good job at finding all sorts of old files. I ended up not using it, instead opting to find a program to repair the NTFS master file table, as my issue was a disk going bad, not a formatted disk.

You can make a BartPE disk to boot from, if you have another computer to make it on.

There appear to be a couple of boot CDs available on the usual (illicit) sites that have many recovery tools.
posted by wierdo at 12:53 PM on July 10, 2007

The R-Studio Demo allows you to recover up to 64k. You may be able to recover your doc with it, if the doc is small enough.
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 1:31 PM on July 10, 2007

Thanks for your answers so far. Right now I'm running R-Studio Demo from the USB hard drive, to see if anything pops up that looks right.

autojack: I'm interested in gpart, but it seems a bit invasive to try to restore the old partition map. Won't it be confused by the fact that the drive isn't just formatted, but also holds some 12GB of new OS files?
posted by springload at 2:26 PM on July 10, 2007

A friend of mine sent his computer to the tech shop last week. They formatted the wrong drive and re-installed windows. We managed to get most of the data back using a utility called GetDataBack.

As with most tools in this category, it allows you to demo the software up until the point you want to recover the file. There are two versions depending if the drive was reformatted with FAT or NTFS. It costs $69 and $79 respectively.

It only took 30 minutes to do the complete scan of the 80GB drive and the actual recovery process was pretty quick too. Best of luck.
posted by Gomez_in_the_South at 3:01 PM on July 10, 2007

First of all, ugh, I'm sorry. I feel your pain.

I've had success with software from DIY DataRecovery. It's free to run the diagnostic which will tell you if it's worth paying for the software. And the guy who wrote the software will give you a lot of help in the support forum.
posted by SampleSize at 3:03 PM on July 10, 2007

Ultimate Boot CD has file recovery tools for a variety of platforms.
posted by iamabot at 3:36 PM on July 10, 2007

I love the way manufacturers call the tool that completely destroys everything you have on your PC "recovery".

My brother-in-law has successfully recovered stuff from a friend's machine that suffered the same thing under instruction from Dell tech support ("By the way, after this step has finished, you'll need to restore your files from backups. You do have backups, don't you?") with Active Undelete slipstreamed into UBCD.
posted by flabdablet at 8:55 PM on July 10, 2007