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Thread: Can you help me to get back my data off from an unformatted hard drive?

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    Can you help me to get back my data off from an unformatted hard drive?

    Recently, I am bothered by my hard drive problems. Please, help me!
    A couple days ago, my bother had accidentally dropped my WD hard drive as it was in use. Every time I attempted to open it in my computer, a message would pop up and asked me to format it at first. But, this drive has contained numerous important files. I cannot just erase them all with the formatting process. So, I come here and hope I can find a way out here.
    Do you have anyway for me to restore all my data back?
    Thank you in advance!

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    Re: Can you help me to get back my data off from an unformatted hard drive?

    There are a lot of programs available to try and recovery files...

    BUT....do not use any of them until you have managed to take an image of the drive and then always work on the image, not the hard drive.

    Once you have an image to work with, go to town on the image with whatever tools you can get your hands on.
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    Re: Can you help me to get back my data off from an unformatted hard drive?

    OK! In my personal experiences, you should always act carefully to restore your data as below:

    1. Do not format this drive in case that the formatting process makes everything worse.

    2. Do not save anything new on this drive till you’ve restore all data back successfully.

    3. Download an external hard drive data recovery program to take chances. In fact, according to your description, your drive data must be still there. As long as you’ve not overwritten it with anything else, you do have chances to get it back with the help of a data recovery program. So, what you should do now is to select a proper data recovery program for your drive data.

    After searching over the internet, you will find there are many data recovery programs available online. But, not all of them are efficient as you think.

    so, if you still doubt, you can firstly try some drive data recovery freeware that always work much more efficiently than some paid ones, such as Recuva, TestDisk and iCare Data Recovery Free, etc.

    4. Do not save or back up all the restored data on the same drive in case of data recovery failure.

    Note:
    I hope you can learn a lesson to back up everything important in the future.

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    Re: Can you help me to get back my data off from an unformatted hard drive?

    Quote Originally Posted by Cammy0879 View Post
    OK! In my personal experiences, you should always act carefully to restore your data as below:

    1. Do not format this drive in case that the formatting process makes everything worse.

    2. Do not save anything new on this drive till you’ve restore all data back successfully.

    3. Download an external hard drive data recovery program to take chances. In fact, according to your description, your drive data must be still there. As long as you’ve not overwritten it with anything else, you do have chances to get it back with the help of a data recovery program. So, what you should do now is to select a proper data recovery program for your drive data.

    After searching over the internet, you will find there are many data recovery programs available online. But, not all of them are efficient as you think.

    so, if you still doubt, you can firstly try some drive data recovery freeware that always work much more efficiently than some paid ones, such as Recuva, TestDisk and iCare Data Recovery Free, etc.

    4. Do not save or back up all the restored data on the same drive in case of data recovery failure.

    Note:
    I hope you can learn a lesson to back up everything important in the future.
    Thank you for your detailed steps. In fact, I am really afraid to lose all my files after receiving the error messages and want to try every possible way to get them back. But, I unfortunately don’t know what I should do. That’s why I post this question here.
    But, after reading your detailed answers, I just followed your steps and tried your mentioned data recovery freeware. They are great, especially the last one that has eventually restored all my wanted files back.
    Thank you very, very, very much!

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    Re: Can you help me to get back my data off from an unformatted hard drive?

    Dot worry about it. I cant assure you about 100% data recovery but yes you can recover more than 70%.
    <snip>
    If your hard drive is asking for a format, format it . Files would be recoverable even after that.
    Last edited by scaryjim; 21-11-2013 at 03:39 PM. Reason: remove apparent advertising

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    Re: Can you help me to get back my data off from an unformatted hard drive?

    Mark, this is your second post (out of three) recommending a particular brand of recovery software. If you have any kind of business relationship with that brand, you should go through formal channels to get permission to advertise/discuss their products on the forums: please see http://hexus.net/advertise/ for details.

    If you're not just here to shill a product, please can I suggest that you start intereacting with the rest of the forum? The best way to convince us you're not advertising is to act like you're not advertising

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    Re: Can you help me to get back my data off from an unformatted hard drive?

    Can you access the drive on an external connection (external HDD enclosure) if so then just access like external hdd then collect data from failing hdd if you can't access the failing hdd then I would surgest a hdd recovery firm look these up on the WWW and just hope its not too late...

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    Re: Can you help me to get back my data off from an unformatted hard drive?

    Use a third-party software to get them back!

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