People sometime find that their files in hard drive or partition were formatted due to hard drive or partition format by mistake, system re-installation or virus attack. This article shows you the cases why your hard drive or partition has been formatted, why you can unformat files, how to perform format recovery under Windows operating system and how to avoid file lose next time.
The cases why your hard drive or partition has been formatted.
Commonly there are five conditions that your hard drive or partition will be formatted:
1, Sometimes, you meet encounter that one of your partitions has not enough space to store files, especially system drive. At this time, if you have no special tool to resize the partition, you have to depend on Windows built-in partition manager to resize them. But this partition manager is not advanced enough to keep your partition intact. And system will automatically format the changed partition, leaving no data.
2, Change your hard disk file system from one to another, from FAT to NTFS for example. As we all know that NTFS is much more advanced than FAT. So more and more people wanna turn their disk file system from FAT to NTFS. But the turning process will lead the changed partition formatted. And after format, all the files will be formatted as well. You will get a completely clean partition with on data.
3, Windows sometimes crashes, or BSOD, and the only way to recover Windows is reinstall it. So people usually choose reinstall Windows operating system. But most computer users may neglect that the Windows re-installation process will format system drive. And most of us have only one partition in whole hard drive. Then if the system installation process format system drive, it means your whole hard drive is formatted. At this time, no matter you have backup (local backup) or not, everything is lost.
4, The most frequently situation of being formatted is USB drive. People always meet “Your USB drive is not formatted” system warning even if you used it a moment ago. And after format that USB drive, data lose.
5, Viruses may also format your partition or hard disk.
Why you can unformat files from formatted hard disk, partition or other storage media
Luckily, no matter how your files is formatted, you still have chance to unformat. If can’t, how FBI recover data from a clean hard drive or even this hard drive is damaged?
No matter you are using Windows, Linux, Unix or other operating systems, data always is saved on storage media, such as hard drive, external hard drive, USB disk, SD card, etc. All of them have one common feature: the format process actually don’t erase data in these storage devices, it just erase the information in partition table (partition table is something to record the information that where the files are stored.) in partition or hard drive. So the truth is your files are still in formatted drive, available for recovery.
However, there is an exception. Format process can be divided into two types: one is quick format, and another one is low-level formatting. Quick format just erases partition table, but low-level formatting will erase all data in hard drive, and there is no way to recover files then. Fortunately, quick format is most frequently used format process by nearly all computer users. Because low-level formatting is only used when the hard drive is the first time use.
How to recover formatted hard drive & partition under Windows?
After checked the upper content, you may already know that format is recoverable. But there is still a question: why you want to recover formatted partition or hard drive? Actually, most computer users just worry about files in formatted partition, the only thing they want is to recover files in it. So we here are talking to the way how you recover files from formatted partition or hard drive.
Tips: in fact, now that partition table is erased, no tool or people can recover your partition or hard drive to original after format. Some software claim that they can recover partition completely. That is a wonderful joke. Don’t trust it.
Do notice one thing: do not write any more new data into the formatted partition or hard drive, because these newly written files may overwrite the original files, and the format recovery success ratio will be greatly reduced.
And there are some tips about the format recovery process:
1, The major file types, such as doc, docx, jpg, gif, txt, can be previewed before recovery. You can make sure the files you selected are the files that you want to recover.
2, If there are too many files listed in recoverable table, you may use “Search” feature to search the specific file names or types.
3, And the whole recovery process is clear and smart, just follow the steps by clicking, you will get your formatted files back.
How to avoid data lose next time?
Although we are doing data recovery service, yet we don’t hope you lose files once and once again. So there are some tips about how to avoid data lose next time. And these tips are helpful no matter format or delete by mistake or other conditions:
1, Make your hard drive have two partitions at least, and save all your important files to non-system partition. Under this condition, even if you reinstalled system, there is no harm to the files that stored in another partition.
2, Do backup your important files into some other storage media, allowing several duplications at the same time. Or even do online backup with some free file syncing software, like DropBox.
