My Seagate Free Agent GoFlex 1TB External USB HDD has got erased.

pritish

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Oct 17, 2011
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I was having two seagate hard disks. One is 8GB USB Hard disk and another one is 1TB USB Free Agent GoFlex Ultra-Portable Drive For PC & Mac.
My problem till yesterday was that first one (8GB) hard disk was not working properly. Even when it connect to system, it was not recognized in any system. One of my friend suggest me to visit seagates websites and find the solution for that. Yesterday I visit seagate's website and I download "SeaTools For Windows" software. When I start to use this software, my both hard disks was connected to my system and I wrongly select the good one (1TB) hard disk and select advanced tests and then select USB Erase Tasks and then Full Disk Erase option. It was running for around 9 hours and suddenly I came to know that I have select wrong hard disk but till that time all my data was lost. I just wanted to know that can I recover that data which got erased by mistake?
For data recovery, I have already purchased seagate's software "File Recovery For Windows" and "Active@ File Recovery For Windows". Can I get all my data from these software? It was important data in that hard disk but due to my mistake, it got erased. Does any one have any other solution for that? I will be thankfull to you if you have any solution. Kindly reply me urgently.
 
I am sorry to say this, but it is unlikely that you can recover the data. Consumer-oriented data recovery processes work with still-readable blocks of information in cases where the disk geometry, partition, or format information was corrupted, or the directories were corrupted. Your Full Disk Erase wrote zeros over every block.

There may be labs that can read it, but that would be quite expensive even to try.
 
Short answer: I would bet money that your data is gone.

I don't know if a lab could recover it. Prices run from $1500 US up, $3000 is not surprising. But if you ran the kind of erase that I think you did, probably only a government agency has good enough hardware to recover it.

Anyone else have experience trying to recover data from a drive that was overwritten with all zeros, or know the Seatools better than I do?
 
AIUI, Seagate's data recovery software is an OEM version of R-Studio. The retail version of this software (NTFS and FAT32) can be purchased directly from the source, at half Seagate's price.

http://www.r-studio.com/

As for your data, if the enclosure is a USB 2.0 box, then the maximum data transfer rate will be around 30MB/s. After 9 hours, you would have written zeros to the first 950GB of the drive:

http://www.google.com/search?q=30+megabytes+per+second+x+9+hours+in+gigabytes

A more typical speed is 20MB/s in which case the number would reduce to 633GB.

Since the file system would have been overwritten, then your data recovery software will be looking for files based on their header information and other identifying characteristics. Photorec is one freeware utility that is capable of such raw data recovery.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
 

thomashetie

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Apr 12, 2014
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You may try seagate hard drive data recovery software, see this solution: recover erased data from seagate hdd

Take note that you'd better do the data recovery as soon as possible. Because more time you wait, more possible that the erased files will be overwritten, more unlikely to recover them.