How to recover photos from a reformatted mac?

June 8, 2010 11:11 AM

A friend of mine recently came to me with an all-too-common problem-- she thought her hard drive died, decided to format it, and then remembered about all the photos she kept on it.

It's a Macbook (I think, maybe iBook, but I doubt it), and since she formatted and reinstalled OS X she hasn't touched it (fearing that if she installed her software, etc. would overwrite whatever might still be there).

Can I help her recover her photos, even though she formatted the system?

posted by phaedrus441 to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

If she had just formatted it and not installed OS X, you'd have some chance at data recovery. Since she wrote new data to the disk, there is very little possibility that her old stuff will be recoverable.
posted by hollisimo at 11:19 AM on June 8, 2010

Did she actually reformat the drive, or did she simply go through the reinstall process for the OS? I'm not sure it's the same for Mac OS, but when you reinstall Windows, you have to go through a few extra steps to reformat the hard drive instead of just reinstalling right on top of the old installation.
posted by scarykarrey at 11:20 AM on June 8, 2010

You can try PhotoRec. Depending on what she did, it might or might not recover some or all of the photos. It is relatively safe to try, especially if you boot from a CD and write the found photos out to a USB drive.
posted by procrastination at 11:23 AM on June 8, 2010

Use PhotoRec (linked above). I've had success doing this by installing Ubuntu onto a USB stick that you have made with a persistent hard drive. From there, just boot from USB (may need to hit F2 to choose boot order when the computer is starting), run PhotoRec, and you will have a time consuming but fruitful process ahead of you.
posted by battlebison at 11:37 AM on June 8, 2010

I've used Photorec (successfully) to pull photographs off a SD Card that choked and ate a ton of pictures. I would imagine that running it on an entire HD would be a slow process, but it's definitely worth a shot.
posted by chunking express at 12:09 PM on June 8, 2010

Response by poster: Cool! I'll give PhotoRec a shot. Thanks!
posted by phaedrus441 at 9:05 AM on June 9, 2010