Recovering files from formated hard drive

[aarone360]

I stupidly formatted the wrong hard drive. I've been recovering files all day, but no program I use has the ability to recover SQL database files (.db).

Is there any program I should use? I've had no trouble finding files but no program has the option for this.

Thanks for all the help!

 

[treefrog07]

I have successfully used TestDisk to recover and restore all data and files from formatted HDDs. Follow the TestDisk wiki and examples. I did not do anything with the corrupt/formatted HDD until I installed it to the good computer and ran TestDisk - doing so increases the chances the backup master boot record (MBR) will be over-written and unrecoverable. I put the formatted HDD into an operating computer, launched the OS on the good system, opened TestDisk, found and restored the master boot record, then went on to that to restore the HDD.

 

[MelvinStrak]

Hi,

Formatting a hard drive nothing but helps you in cleaning of bad sectors and the broken files; formatting a hard drive does not erase the data on it. Only the entry in the partition table is removed but not the contents of the file or the files. Though the file might be deleted but still the contents will be existed on the hard drive unless it is overwritten by another file. So there are always high chances to recover files from formatted drive with the hard drive recovery application.

 

[Allnsmth]

Hi,
You can recover data from formatted hard drive .....!
Hard disks have a low-level format, which sets certain properties of the disk such as the interleave factor. The low-level format also determines what type of disk controller can access the disk.If you lost data during formatting your hard drive..you can easily got back.

 

[treefrog07]

Just find out if the software you plan to use is free, or if you want to pay for it. TestDisk is free; I found no other programs that will recover data from formatted HDDs that were free - I found several that would find the folders and files, but wanted ~$70 before they would recover them. I also found that TestDisk finds and recovers the folders and files much faster than any of the others I found.

 

[FreeDataRecovery]

Another vote for Testdisk. The interface to Teskdisk takes some getting used to so you may want to try it out on a disk you don't care about first.