Hard drive formatted by mistake? Perform hard drive unformat right now!

Format and Unformat

Formatting: It is the process of deleting all data from a hard drive and setting up a file system for a partition to prepare it for data storage. There are certain situations where you might need to format your hard drive, such as when your hard drive has a RAW file system, and Windows shows "Drive needs formatting" or if the hard drive is infected with viruses. Apart from this, users may accidentally format their hard drive or external storage devices, which is quite common among users.

Unformatted: This refers to the process of recovering data from a formatted storage device, whether it's a hard drive, USB flash drive, or an SD card. When a user wants to retrieve data lost due to formatting, they need to unformat the hard drive. This can only be accomplished through third-party software or manual data recovery services.

How to Recover a Formatted Hard Drive with Data Recovery Software

To “unformat the hard drive,” in other words, the user needs to recover all the deleted data from the hard disk. As mentioned, you need to choose a data recovery service to perform the recovery process. Here, we recommend a tool – Data Recovery Wizard – that can help you unformat HDD and get your files back with just a few steps.

Apart from data recovery from formatted hard drive, Data Recovery Wizard can do more for you:

• Recovers all types of lost data. It also supports undeleting files from the Recycle Bin, and retrieving data lost due to formatted or missing partitions, software crashes, virus attacks, boot failures, or other reasons.
• Recovers data from various devices. It can also perform data recovery from USB flash drives, memory cards, digital cameras, and other common storage devices.
• Preview before recovery. To ensure the content is correct, it lets you preview lost files before actually recovering them.

Download Data Recovery Wizard now and follow the guide below to fix formatted HDD.

Steps to recover formatted HDD using the Data Recovery Wizard tool:

Note: To ensure a higher chance of data recovery, install the data recovery tool on a different disk from the formatted one.

Step 1: Run the Wondershare Data Recovery Wizard. Select the hard drive partition that you accidentally formatted, and click "Scan".

Step 2: The formatting hard drive recovery software will start scanning all lost data and files. After the scan, you can click on “Filter” to filter specific file types for quick search of your required files. Or you can click on “Find File or Folder” to select the data you want to recover.

Step 3: Preview the scanned files and check those you want to recover. Click “Recover”. Select a new location to save these files and then click “OK”.

As long as your formatted partition has not been written over with new data, the Data Recovery Wizard tool will help you retrieve all lost files from your hard drive.

Tool Data Recovery Services

Contact our experts for a free assessment.

Consult with our Tool Data Recovery specialists for personalized manual recovery services. After a free diagnosis, we offer the following services:

• Repair of damaged RAID structures, unbootable Windows operating systems, and corrupted virtual disk files (.vmdk, .vhd, .vhdx, etc.)
• Recovery/repair of lost partitions and repartitioned drives
• Unformatting hard drives and repairing original drives (including BitLocker encrypted drives)
• Fixing disks turned into GPT protective partitions

Why we can recover formatted hard drive?

In this part, we will explain how to recover data without formatting the hard drive. If you want to know why formatted hard drive can be recovered, keep reading for more details.

There are two types of formatting for all storage devices: quick format and full format. A quick format only overwrites the clusters that contain the file system structure and deletes all files on the device, while a full format writes zeros to all data sectors. After a quick format, the data remains on the hard drive, only you can't access them. By rebuilding the volume, you can access and recover formatted files.

However, as mentioned above, the overwritten data cannot be recovered, meaning that data lost after a full format is irretrievable. Luckily, quick format is the default formatting option in Windows. So, if you accidentally formatted your hard drive, it was most likely a quick format, and you can unformat it with tools like Data Recovery Wizard.

Bottom line

If you accidentally formatted your hard drive, USB flash drive, memory card, or any other storage device, don't worry. Stop using your device and employ data recovery software to unformat your hard drive. You'll then retrieve all your files.