Format recovery

Introduction

Format recovery is the data recovery process from a hard drive, a camera memory card, an USB flash drive, memory stick, etc. that was formatted or reformatted.

The step-by-step tutorial below describes the procedure to recover data when

• The drive was accidentally formatted and you want to unformat the drive.
• The drive was reformatted by quick format or full format or even formatted twice.

Solution

Stop what you're doing

You should have a strong sense of "DO Nothing" after you format or reformat drive by mistake. Stop what you're doing, please don't write new data to the drive that was formatted or reformatted by mistake. Or else, it is hard to recover lost data.

Why can we do format recovery?

When you format hard drive, the Operating System resets the FAT or MFT on the disk. The reason that you can no longer see the files under Windows is that the MFT tells the Operating System that the drive letter does not contain any files, but the files are still where they were. That's why we could do format recovery. The "format recovery" means to transfer the files on the formatted hard drive or partition to a separate one.

Tips: In Windows 7, if you Full Format a partition, you cannot recover files from it, as Windows will erase data completely. Fortunately, the default format option in Windows 7 is Quick Format.

Format recovery: recover files from formatted drive

Find a data recovery software that can recover files from formatted or reformatted drive, such as EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Free Edition as following.

Step-by-step format recovery with this free data recovery software, refer to How to recover files from formatted drive?

Don't let this happen again

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