When your hard drive is formatted, re-formatted or repartitioned the files will be lost or may become inaccessible. In such cases, you need to retrieve and restore the data on the hard drive to the original state by using data recovery software. Some of the reasons for formatting the hard drive may be either physical damage or logical damage. Few scenarios are listed below
- Accidental formatting of drives
- Re-partitioning using partitioning utilities
- Upgrading the operating system
- System errors
- Bad sectors
- Software malfunction
- Virus attacks
- Power failure
Whenever you come across the above situations, you format, re-format your hard drive. In order to achieve data recovery after format, stop using the drive right away, avoid installing any new software / applications on the formatted hard drive, do not run any disk utilities or write / save any new data on the drive from which you would like to recover data.
Accidentally formatting a drive does not result in permanent loss of data. The operating system does not actually erase it from your hard drive and the space occupied by the lost file is just marked as available or free, so that the newly saved file will occupy the free space and result in overwriting. Therefore, whenever you try saving new files the operating system simply replaces this free space with new data and the previous files are replaced.
Formatted data recovery software has the capability to restore lost files form formatted, re-formatted partitions, re-partitioned hard drives and even data can be retrieved from drives even after re-installing operating system i.e. Windows or Mac. This software will allow you to preview files even before recovery, which helps you to evaluate the ability of the software. Since it is read-only software, it does not write anything on the drive, so that you can save your data from getting lost permanently.