How to unformat a hard drive?

HappyDays2010

Help!

My dad has an external hard drive he keeps 8,000 photos on. His computer kept asking him to format something, and when he selected no it wouldnt let him go any further so he selected yes and now the 8,000 photos have dissapeared.

Is it possible to get these photos back? Does anyone know of anywhere in Dublin he could bring it to?

I havent a clue what the name of the hard drive is. Sorry I havent more info.

Thanks for any help!

DarkDusk

My friend used this to recover a hard drive but I no nothing about it, so hopefully someone else will be able to give you info about it. There's a lot involved in it though so you'd want to be good enough with computers. I also looked this up on google to see if their is any more info to make it easier to do this with the program, this is what someone said on yahoo answers:

There are many ways to recover from a formatted hard drive.

Most of them require a decent amount of computer "know-how" to work.

Do you want to recover data that was on there or just restore the operating system?

If you just want to get your files back, I would try a bootable windows cd like this one:
http://www.ubcd4win.com/
It comes with all sorts of tools, including a disc recovery program.

Burn that to a cd and boot from it.

On the desktop there will be a icon that has to do with recovery. Its been a while, but I think its called recover my files or something.

Anyway, run that and than drag whatever files you want onto a pen drive of some sort. DO NOT TRY TO RECOVER THE FILES ONTO THE SAME HARD DRIVE YOU ARE TRYING TO RECOVER FROM! Sorry for the caps but yea thats very important.

It's not much to go on but hopefully some of this will be helpful!

Regards,
James.

spannerotoole

Called Photorec which is designed to do the very thing that you wish to do. It's an open source program so it's free, but be sure to restore the photo's onto a different hard drive. For best results run it from a live distro such as knoppix-std and make sure you have an external hard drive to restore them to. BEWARE!!! This might also undelete files that you have previously deleted so use caution. the files will named something like fsxxx.ext
so look for the ones with .jpg on the end. These are your photos.

HappyDays2010

Thanks a mill for the info James. My dad really isnt good with computers and just uses it for photos and browsing. I live 150 miles away so I'm not much use. I'm hoping he can just leave the external hard disk into somewhere in Dublin and they can do it.

wexie

HappyDays2010 wrote: »

Thanks a mill for the info James. My dad really isnt good with computers and just uses it for photos and browsing. I live 150 miles away so I'm not much use. I'm hoping he can just leave the external hard disk into somewhere in Dublin and they can do it.

He no doubt will find many places that can do that for him, however it's likely to cost quite a bit of money.

If you think you could do it yourself you could always try something like logmein ? Being 150 miles away makes no difference whatsoever these days.....

(unfortunately my mother has realised this and makes me look after her computer, I guess at least now she doesnt hover over my shoulder asking me to explain what I'm doing )

DarkDusk

HappyDays2010 wrote: »

Thanks a mill for the info James. My dad really isnt good with computers and just uses it for photos and browsing. I live 150 miles away so I'm not much use. I'm hoping he can just leave the external hard disk into somewhere in Dublin and they can do it.

No bother. Ya, you/your Dad could email or ring around to the local computer repairs and see how far you get.

Good luck!

HappyDays2010

Thanks a mill everyone. I'm not too hot with computers myself so I'm not even going to attempt it, but hes going to bring his hard drive into somewhere tommorrow.

He said he'll sleep a bit better now after me telling him it is possible to get them back!

Thanks