Do You Need a Guaranteed Unformat?

You've likely come here to find a way to unformat your hard drive because you accidentally formatted it.  You're possibly very stressed about this situation and that's understandable.

The most important thing to remember is not to do anything else to the drive such as trying to do another format or repartition.  If all you did was just the accidental format, then it's still possible to recover your data.

If your data is critical to you and if you've never even done a file recovery before, then I urge you to seek help from a professional data recovery expert.  Manipulating the low level hard drive data structures is tricky work and a misstep in the process could make a data recovery impossible.

Assuredly, there is no software that can guarantee the successful recovery of all data from an accidentally formatted hard drive.  Even professional data recovery services cannot guarantee this.   However, when you do use one of these experts, you have the best possible chance of getting your data back from that unresponsive hard disk drive.

A reliable recovery service will handle your drive in the safest possible manner.  For starters, they will not try to write to the formatted hard drive.  That is, they won't try to do an unformat on the actual hard drive itself.  Instead, they will first read the entire drive to make an image copy of that disk.  Then they will only work on that copy of the disk.  This is the safest way to go if you absolutely must get your data back.

If you can't afford the services of a data recovery company, then I advise that you follow this same procedure.  You'll need a disk image program and space to store a file the size of the disk you're trying to recover.  If you don't have the disk space for this, then you have no choice but to buy another disk at least as large as the one you're trying to recover the data from.

When the need to recover data is not critical, then you may avoid the extra step of making a disk image.  In that event, you likely have a backup of all your data to help you quickly recover from any loss.  If you aren't currently making backups of your most important files, I'd like to take a moment to introduce you to the concept of the online backup.  These services are offered by several fine companies and most will give you a few gigabytes of free storage.  Recovering files takes just a few mouse clicks and the backups are automatic so you don't have to think about it.  You really ought to give free online backup a try.

So, if you're a hobbyist and would like to learn more about doing a hard drive unformat, you'll be happy to know about this great free utility called testDisk.  TestDisk is especially designed to recover lost partitions.  It has more features than most of the commercial recovery programs.  It can unformat Mac disks, Windows disks, Linux disks, even Vista is supported.

Become familiar with the use of TestDisk on a spare drive before you actually need to depend on it for a real data recovery operation.  I say this not because I think the utility is unreliable, but because it is a powerful tool that will take some practice to use properly.

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