How To Recover Formatted External Hard Drive in Windows 10/8/7?

Table of Contents

• Scenarios that external hard drive gets formatted
• Is it possible to recover data from formatted external hard drive?
• How to recover formatted external hard drive?
• Conclusion

Scenarios that external hard drive gets formatted

We all know that formatting will cause data loss. In general, many users will not format their external hard drive randomly. However, during the daily use of external hard drive, it is unavoidable that in some cases the external hard drive will be formatted either on purpose or by mistake, for instance:

• The external hard drive is infected with computer virus, and the formatting operation can clean up virus.
• You want to change file system type of the external hard drive. For example, the default file system type of many external hard drive is NTFS, but you want to use it under Linux system, so you need to convert NTFS to EXT4 or FAT32.
• The external hard drive becomes RAW format and cannot be opened, prompting that you need to format the disk before you can use it. Some users may format the external hard drive according to the system prompts.
• Improper operations. For example, when making a bootable disk, the external hard drive is selected mistakenly, and the external hard drive gets formatted.

No matter it is intentional or unintentional, files on the external hard drive will be lost after formatting. If lost data has not been backed up, you need to find a way to recover them from formatted external hard disk.

Is it possible to recover data from external hard drive?

After external hard drive is formatted, you can use special data recovery software to recover lost files, or you can seek help from a professional engineer to recover data. However, the cost of hiring an expert is relatively high. In many cases, external hard drive data recovery software can get back lost files from formatted partition, and the data recovery result is also very good.

DiskGenius is professional data recovery software, it not only supports external hard drive data recovery, but also supports partition recovery and file recovery from hard disks, memory cards, USB flash drive, virtual disks and other devices. It is a read-only process when restoring data and will not cause any damage to lost data and device. In addition, DiskGenius provides a free trial version by which you can scan and preview lost files before purchasing a license code. Thus, you can fully estimate the recovery result of external hard drive recovery in advance.

How to recover formatted external hard drive?

The following is the data recovery method after external hard drive is formatted. You can retrieve lost files from external hard drive according to following steps.

Preparations:

• A computer running Windows
• The external hard drive that needs data recovery
• The external hard drive data recovery software – DiskGenius

The step-by-step guide of recovering files after formatting external hard drive

Step 1. Run DiskGenius software.

Free download the latest version of DiskGenius from the official website, and you can install and launch it on your computer easily.

Step 2. In DiskGenius, select the formatted partition on the external hard drive, and click the File Recovery button.

Step 3. Select recovery mode and then click Start button to search for formatted files.

You need to choose recovery modes according to the specific data loss reason. For example, if you only want to recover formatted data, please select "Complete Recovery" and "Search for Known File Types". If you want to recover files that had been deleted before formatting, then you can check "Recover Deleted Files" at the same time.

After clicking the "Start" button, DiskGenius starts a complete and in-depth scanning for the formatted drive where lost files were stored. If the space which needs to scan is not too large, the scan will be completed soon.

Step 4. Preview lost data.

After the software lists lost files, you can preview them one by one. Click on a folder on the left side of the software, and files in the folder will be displayed on the right side of the software. If you double-click a file, the software will pop up a preview window to display content of the file, such as the image below, it is previewing an image file.

Step 5. Recover external hard drive data.

Select the data to be recovered in the scan results, then right-click selected files and choose the "Copy To" option. After that, you can set a folder on the computer hard disk or other device to save recovered data.

Conclusion

The above is the whole process of recovering files from formatted external hard disk. Here are two tips for those who suffer from the problem that external hard drive gets formatted accidentally: any read and write operations on the external hard drive should be stopped immediately in order to prevent lost data from being overwritten; use professional external hard drive recovery software to unformat hard drive.