How to recover whole HDD after format?

[jchen855]

Hi everyone,

I just did something very stupid, I formatted the wrong external hard drive...
I know it's possible to recover the files, but I'm a bit lost with all the different programs available.
Could someone recommend a free software that will recover every file?
I've been looking online and most software I found allow to recover files one by one, but I haven't found one that will just recover everything.
I used " Minitool partition wizard home edition v7.1" to partition the hdd, I'm pretty sure it did a quick format and not a full format as it only took 2 sec to finish.

If you need more information, please let me know

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[szaboaz]

Yep, the same applies to GetDataBack.

You can try Recuva, for a free alternative, and compare its results to other (demo) ones.


Some people suggest Partition Recovery, http://www.easeus.com/partition-recovery/ . It has the advantage of being able to "unformat" the drive in an instant, if you're lucky, but I would leave it as a last resort, because it does writing operations on the drive, something you should avoid in a situation like this.

 

[Hawkeye22]

This also looks like a viable solution.

http://www.z-a-recovery.com/unformat-tutorial.htm

 

[jchen855]

Thanks for the tips, Getdataback, recuva and Z a recovery are similar to the programs I found on google, I'm still performing a scan with easeus data recovery wizard, it's been going on for 10 hours now and still have 12 more to go. The hdd is 1tb and it only had 10-20gb free. But the problem is, I don't have 1tb free on my other drives to copy the files. So this option will be a hassle as I'll have to find a friend who has a hdd with this much free space...

The second option is Partition recovery which if I understood correctly, I wont need the 1tb of free space, but I have a question about this. I haven't touched the partition on this drive, the only thing I did is format it and I thought the partition recovery programs were for when I deleted the partition. Am I wrong? If I go for this option, will it just undo the quick format I did without having to recover all the files one by one?
I understand as szaboaz said that this option is riskier as it writes on the hdd, but I'd like to understand the differences between these two options.