Nephew formatted an external hard drive through the Xbox containing all my sisters uni work, tried Recuva and EaseUS

[Jameslarden]

Hello there, i'm not sure if this is the right place for this because this is my first post.

Recently my nephew accidentally formatted my sisters external hard drive by plugging it into the Xbox, he has wiped everything off and I don't know how to recover it, if it is even recoverable.

I tried two quick scans on Recuva and EaseUS but both returned nothing. I'm currently running the recuva deep scan but i'm not sure if it will find anything, i've heard that the format might have zeroed(?) the hard drive, though i'm not entirely sure on that.

We haven't used the hard drive since it was formatted, everything has stayed the same as far as i'm aware. The only thing I have done is plugged it into a different computer (mine) and tried to recover the data.

We would be willing to go to professionals but would prefer it if we could sort it out at home due to the professional services apparently being very expensive.

Any help is very much appreciated as my sister could lose all her uni work and her job placement if we can't recover it.

Thanks for reading.

 

[Reyaz123]

I see that you have tried Easeus. If you haven't, try Easeus Data Recovery Wizard.

Never heard of a drive being zeroed when plugged into an xbox. Since nothing came up on the scans, that points towards a zeroed hard drive

 

[Jameslarden]

Oops I accidentally clicked the solution button. This is my first post, my bad, is there nay way to undo that?

I actually meant that I used EaseUS data recovery wizard, my mistake. I didn't realise there was a difference.

The quick scans both recovered nothing and i've heard from someone else that it formats it to Fat 32 and i'm pretty much screwed but I have no idea what that means... Any explanations are greatly appreciated!

 

[Reyaz123]

Solution unselected.

Fat32 is a file system type like NTFS. Shouldn't affect whether you can get data from it or not
Whoever moved it to the xbox most likely zero written over the drive

Sorry. If those programs can't see anything the data is gone
For future reference, purchase a external backup hard drive to have an extra copy of your data to prevent these types of problems.

 

[DeathRabit]

Try also this program:
http://wise-data-recovery.en.softonic.com/
This program help me few times.

 

[Jameslarden]

Solution unselected.

Fat32 is a file system type like NTFS. Shouldn't affect whether you can get data from it or not
Whoever moved it to the xbox most likely zero written over the drive

Sorry. If those programs can't see anything the data is gone
For future reference, purchase a external backup hard drive to have an extra copy of your data to prevent these types of problems.

I don't think he zeroed the drive then, he literally just picked it up and plugged it into the Xbox which reformatted it to Fat 32.

Would it be possible to reformat it back to NTFS and recover the files? Or would that make no difference?

I'm honestly so confused, I know he hasn't zeroed the drive because he doesn't know how to do anything other than play minecraft on the computer, and all he did was plug it in but shouldn't that mean the data is recoverable?

 

[Jameslarden]

Try also this program:
http://wise-data-recovery.en.softonic.com/
This program help me few times.

I'm definately willing to try out more software, so thank you for that, I was looking for reccommendations but they're hard to find.

 

[Reyaz123]

You could try reformatting it to NTFS and using the recovery programs afterwards since it doesn't have any data on it. Would make the data recovery more difficult to scan using recovery programs though. But try this first:

Open disk management

Right click on the hard drive and select import
Assign a drive letter
Check if the data shows up and run a recovery program deep scan once more

I hope it works.

 

[Jameslarden]

You could try reformatting it to NTFS and using the recovery programs afterwards since it doesn't have any data on it. Would make the data recovery more difficult to scan using recovery programs though. But try this first:

Open disk management

Right click on the hard drive and select import
Assign a drive letter
Check if the data shows up and run a recovery program deep scan once more

I hope it works.

Sadly it already had a drive letter, it's assigned to G: if that's what you mean. So I don't think this is going to help, it didn't have an import option instead it had 'Change letter'.

I have another thread going on over at /r/TechSupport and somebody suggest using TestDisk to recover the NTFS partition but he wanted a second opinion before I tried it. Do you have any thoughts? And if I do it, will it screw it up for any future professionals I might take it to?

Thank you for replying and helping me, it means a lot.

 

[Reyaz123]

You can try using this:http://www.easeus.com/partition-recovery/

There's a chance you could get it back but wouldn't be as effective as data recovery programs

 

[Jameslarden]

You can try using this:http://www.easeus.com/partition-recovery/

There's a chance you could get it back but wouldn't be as effective as data recovery programs

I have just realised that i'm an idiot for not including this in the first place, I worded my post pretty poorly.

I can open the hard drive through the windows explorer and see a couple of folders and the content in them, they are randomly numbered files with seemingly no extension, this is what they look like:

http://gyazo.com/40676a2725136dd79ef11bce2dc8b4b5

I have no idea how to go about learning what they are or how to open them though, any ideas?

 

[laviniuc]

in recuva, there's an option to scan unformatted drives somewhere in the advanced options, try that too.