Recovering data form reformatted external hard drive

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DavyG

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#103306 3-Jun-2012 20:33

I have a 2TB external hard drive. I formatted it through osx and everything was working fine. It has/had about 1TB of data on it.

Somebody else in the household runs a pc. His pc could not see the hard drive at all. I told him that it was cos it had to be formatted either to run on a pc or a mac.

Now, it can be seen by a pc and does not even register with my mac.

My awful sinking fear is that all the data on it is now irretrievable. Is that correct, or would there be some way to access it again?

sbiddle

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Biddle Corp

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#635219 3-Jun-2012 21:07

Mac and PC's use completely different formatting methods by default, so a HDD can't be used between the two by default.

If you plugged it into a PC and formatted the drive you would have wiped everything that was on the drive. Assuming you haven't done anything to the drive since you formatted it you do stand a resonable chance of recovering the data, and my recommendation would be to send it to a data recovery company to recover the data. It probably won't cost more than a few hundred to get this done.

There are applications that you can run that may help you, but in all seriousness I'm guessing the fact that you did format the drive shows that you don't fully understand things, so paying somebody to recover the data is probably the best option if it is important.

DavyG

6 posts

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#635225 3-Jun-2012 21:30

Thanks very much for your helpful reply.

You're right - I don't know a whole lot about all this. But I do know enough to have never even contemplated doing what was done. The culprit was my 22 year-old son. I figured my two options were kill him, or post a question here.

It was done only a couple of days ago and I am almost certain that no new data has been written to the drive since it happened. Any suggestions on who might help with this in Christchurch? There is a possibility that full copyright may not have been paid on all of the data I am wanting to recover.

dontpanic42

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#635236 3-Jun-2012 22:07

As sbiddle has suggested, if you are wanting the best chance of recovering the data, your best bet is to take it to professionals who know what they are doing. It will likely cost you an pretty penny, but it would be your best option.

In saying that, you could try something like Recuva made by Piriform.
Just be sure that you don't write any new data to the drive. So, if you do try Recuva, set the destination for the recovered files to another hard drive.

josephhinvest

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#635251 3-Jun-2012 22:42

If you're going to try recovery from the Mac, I've had good results using Data Rescue 3
Once when a junior co-worker helpfully repartitioned a customer drive, I was able to recover 100% of the files. I then went for a little lie down.

Cheers,
Joseph