Hard Disk Catastrophe: How to Recover Data from a Formatted Hard Drive

You know what’s ironic? I work in desktop support, and I tell people to back up their data every day. Yet just recently I experienced my worst case of data loss ever, which could have been easily avoided had I just backed up my massive collection of music (nearly 50GB by this point) and lesser (but more invaluable) collection of digital photos.

It all started when I decided to do a clean installation of Windows XP. I was having an annoying issue that was preventing me from loading XP without using the “Last known config” option at startup, and multiple repair installations did nothing to solve the issue. Since that installation was nearly three years old, I decided it was worthwhile to just start from scratch. Luckily, I keep my XP installation in a separate 15GB partition just for this sort of occasion. With XP in its own space, I can just format that and leave all of my other data intact–at least that’s how it’s supposed to work.

I was in a heated “Gears of War” multiplayer match while casually stepping through the ugly first portion of the XP installation, and I would later realize this is where things went horribly wrong. While choosing the partition to install Windows on I received an unusual screen that I really should have paid more attention to. I was actually attempting to do a “soft” reinstallation at first, wherein only the C:\Windows directory is overwritten, when I got a message saying that Windows couldn’t be installed on that partition without reformatting. Since I didn’t mind losing the data on that partition anyway, I shrugged off the error and proceeded reformat.

Upon completing the Windows installation, I was shocked to realize that two of my most important partitions were missing. I quickly checked the status of my disks in the Disk Management utility and noted with horror that my Windows disk now only had one partition. I had trouble sleeping that night.

I’ve helped people through file recoveries before using various undelete software, but I’ve never had to restore entire lost partitions, so I considered myself royally screwed. Based on the advice of this ExtremeTech article, I procured a demo of Iolo’s Search and Recover 4. After a few hours of scanning with the software’s partition recovery function it couldn’t find a thing. All hope was lost.

In even further desperation, I came across SoftLogica’s Handy Recovery 3.0. Not expecting much, I let the software scan for the disk partitions for a few hours and tried to put the whole situation out of mind by numbing the pain with even more “Gears of War.” I know it’s partially to blame for this whole thing, but the game is too damned addictive to stay mad at ;) When I got back to my computer, I nearly fell out of my seat. Handy had successfully found all of the partitions I lost, and seemed eager to put my mind at rest. I whipped out my credit card, and the game was on.

The next day I received the serial number at work and quickly plugged it in when I got home. After a few hours of recovery, Handy had successfully restored nearly 60GB of data I previously had thought was lost. There isn’t much more to say about the product, all I know is that it saved me from near catastrophe, and I would recommend it to every PC user. It was only $40, which is actually on the low-end for disk recovery software. The UI is clean, the program is bug free from what I can tell, and it can perform miracles. What better praise can I give it?