Tutorial to unformat external hard drive

In this article, we will introduce the method to unformat external hard drive. After reading, I believe you will not be troubled in data loss due to format any longer and know how to recover data from formatted external hard drive.

Case of Data Loss Due to Format

As a PC technician, I always help people solve their problems about computer. Recently I often receive calls requiring about method to unformat external hard drive or solution for data loss in external hard drive. Today I will illustrate a typical method to unformat external hard drive by the following case from Robin.

Yesterday Robin called me in rush, "I wrongly formatted my external hard drive morning and forgot to backup a very crucial folder with crucial data for the meeting of our operation. How do I unformat the external hard drive to recover data?"

By definition, the act of wrongly formatting the external hard drive erased everything on the drive, of cause, Robin call me so anxiously for method to unformat the external hard drive.

However, It's lucky for Robin, I just told him not do any operation on the formatted external hard drive, because the faster he unformat the external hard drive, the more chances he could recover data.

Method to unformat external hard drive

Before I introduced the method to unformat external hard drive to Robin, I told him to pay attention to several points.

He mentioned that he forgot to backup a crucial folder in the external hard drive. The first lesson he should walk away from the experience is simple: backup, about which I mean regular, periodic backup and backup data to a stable external hard drive.

Second, before calling me for the method to unformat the external hard drive, he tried to use one-key-restore to recover data from the external hard drive. I told him that one-key-restore is used to restore data in system partition, but not used to recover data from external hard drive. And do not try to format hard drive and restore system partition so easily.

I also told him some knowledge about format. Quick format simply erases the hard disk's root directory, twiddles a couple of other things, and you're done. Note that it did not actually go out and overwrite files. Normal format actually goes out and overwrites all of the data on the disk. You'll know you're performing a normal format as it takes a long time.

If we have done a quick format to external hard drive, then there is more chance for us to unformat the external hard drive to recover data. What we need is just unformat software, and normal "undelete" utilities will probably not work. Here professional unformat software EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard is what we need. Here let's learn how to unformat external hard drive with Data Recovery Wizard.

Steps to unformat external hard drive

Step A: Download this software and launch it, and choose a module to recover files according to method of data loss. "Deleted File Recovery" is for deletion recovery, "Complete Recovery" is for format recovery and some other kind of data loss, and "Partition Recovery" is used when partition is lost or deleted. Here we choose "Format Recovery" to unformat external hard drive.

Step B: Select the file types you want to recover. Tick 'Search lost files by types' to find the specific lost file types. Tick 'Ignore bad sectors' to skip bad sectors when scanning.

Step C: Choose the partition of the formatted external hard drive to start searching, and then we will see a list of volumes where data loss possibly happens. And then, press "NEXT" button, it will launch the "Building Directory" procedure to search the files. We will see file/folder tree very soon.

Step D: Choose and preview the lost that we want to recover from external hard drive and press the "Next" button. And then select a directory and press the "NEXT" button to save them.

Besides external hard drive, we also can use Data Recovery Wizard to unformat and undelete other storage media such as RAID, internal hard drive, USB flash drive, digital camera, digital audio player, memory stick, SD card, compact flash, etc. under Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista/2008/Windows 7.

We could free download demo version to scan and preview lost data in external hard drive and use full version to recover and save them. Just feel free to try it when we need to unformat external hard drive.

 

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