Question Yikes, unformat drive

[acadia11]

So, you know there is a reason you backup your drives (older backup of this drive), somehow just formatted the drive in question, however it was a quick format.
So, what is ideal data recovery software that can recover all of the drive? Anything that can do entire disk without caring about specific filetypes?

Upon further review it may not have quick formatted at all, but teradata copy may have deleted, which may be better. note have used stellar, and few others but these focus on media files, standard files, thinking something with full partition recovery? have not overwritten anything on the drive that i'm aware.

 

[Lutfij]

TestDisk and Recuva are two that come to mind but your mileage can and will vary.

 

[Ralston18]

Regarding "have not overwritten anything on the drive that i'm aware."

Turn off/disable updates in the meantime.

 

[acadia11]

Regarding "have not overwritten anything on the drive that i'm aware."

Turn off/disable updates in the meantime.

HOw do you recommend turn on disable updates? It's internal SATA drive just sitting on my desk connected to SATA reader externally, I was in the process of backing up the data to a different drive... lol , somehow I formatted the source drive. Actually, I think teracopy deleted the files when I stopped slow transfer. But either case I just unplugged the drive from the sata drive reader.

Someone mentioned use dd to copy the drive entirely to another disk. And then start playing on that other disk to ensure the original isn't damaged any further?

 

[Ralston18]

Windows and many applications are subject to updates that can occur at almost anytime.

Windows can be configured to pause updates. Microsoft can overwrite pauses.

Some updates are pushed out on a pre-determined schedule. Other updates may be pushed ad hoc to address some critical problem or discovered vulnerability.

Updates may download and execute on their own. Or just download and wait for the end user to ok or otherwise allow the update. In any case the host data disk is affected by having data written to it.

If the boot drive (C has been accidentally formatted beyond the OS and associated apps being unable to load and run updates then pausing updates is indeed moot.

The main point being to ensure that nothing else happens that would or could result the accidentally formatted source drive suffering additional changes (writes) of any sort that could interfere with data recovery.

Agree - if the accidentally formatted drive can be cloned to experiment with data recovery apps then that would/should leave the original source drive intact.