Before moving further we need to understand what we mean by Formatting & Re-formatting.
- Formatting - When you accidentally or knowingly format any logical drive to the same file system again i.e. NTFS formatted again to create a NTFS partition, which means you again have chosen the same file system to manage your data.
- Re-formatting - When we format a logical drive from NTFS to any other file system, at that time we actually are reformatting and resizing the drive and selecting a separate file system for the logical drive to manage the data. For e.g. a NTFS partition can be re-formatted to FAT16, FAT32 or Ext3FS etc.
The recovery of data is possible in this case and a procedure needs to be followed to recover data from the logical drive.
Step 1: Connect the drive from which data needs to be recovered to the system where Disk Doctors NTFS Data Recovery software is already installed.
Step 2: Launch the application and further the wizard.
Step 3: Select the hard drive which was attached for recovery
Step 4: Select option "Recover your Data"
Step 5: Select option "Scan for logical drives", and further select option "Thorough Scan".
Step 6: Software would display a dialog box confirming sector range to scan, do not change any values and press "Ok" to initiate the scanning process.
Step 7: Thorough Scan is a time consuming process, so leave the software until the process is finished.
Step 8: Once process is over logical drives would be listed in the dialog box to select.
Step 9: Select the logical drive from which data needs to be recovered; you can identify the logical drive by its starting location in the drive.
Step 10: Once drive is selected, software automatically would scan it for files and folders and would display the data in a tree format.
Thorough Scan
This scan option has been designed to not only search for a partition but also to verify its validity.
Let’s consider an example: Suppose we have 10 GB hard disk which is having 2 equal sized NTFS partition, which now has been reformatted as one single 10 GB FAT32 logical drive. Now to recover the data from the older partitions you would need to use NTFS data recovery software only.
The thorough scan would search the drive for only NTFS related attributes and would display the lost 2 NTFS partitions for you to recover, as scanning the FAT drive with FAT data recovery software would display the data of current FAT partition, however the unused space still holds the data of older NTFS partitions, which can be traced and recovered by NTFS data recovery software only.
If you are looking for RAID Recovery services, kindly contact our Data Recovery Services Lab at 1.800.347.5377