Recovering HDD

Alright NBR members, I have never needed your help as much as now.

I need to recover some extremely important data from a formatted hard drive. What is the best software to do this? I need something for recovering data that is the equivalent of DBAN for erasing data.

Thank you so much.
Leon

 

There isn't anything free and readily available that I would refer refer to as the "equivalent of DBAN for erasing data"... That I am aware of...

However, the program I generally recommend to people in this case is TestDisk & PhotoRec available here: (These are free, and moderately powerful.)

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

It will definitely be able to recover your files as long as it was just formatting and possibly a little bit of overwriting you did... But if you DBANed it I doubt it will work (may be worth a try?).

TestDisk will attempt to recover/rebuild the old partition table allowing you full access to the drive and all the files as you would have had before formatting. PhotoRec will scan the drive and recover all retrievable files.

 

Alright. Thanks.

 

DBAN overwrites each block on a computer's hard drive several times.
From what I've read about overwriting a drive, it's just that, overwriting with new random data. But the data is still available underneath and recoverable. (Upto 6 passes or so) Recovery such as this isn't something the average joe can do, you'll need to get it recovered from professionals (three-digits) .
There are loads of data recovery software here.

 

I only did one pass of DoD Short, so I'm guessing that there is a good chance of recovering it.

 

I did something stupid last night as well. i was formatting my comp and my external hdd was connected, and i accidentally removed that partition. will test disk work for me or are there paid programs that can do it better?

 

What sort of data are you trying to recover - text files, images, ...?

 

The DoD spec is actually 3 passes per one DoD short pass, I believe. First all zeros, then all ones, and then random data...per pass.

 

If all you did was delete the partition, you basically did nothing more than invalidate the logical structure that defined where the partition was, but you didn't actually do anything to the underlying files or the file structure (other than make it impossible for the default Win disk software to "see" the partition).

The most important thing to do first is to make sure nothing gets written to that disk. For recovery, there are any number of utilities out there, many of which offer free or trial versions that will actually recover small files and may repair the partition structure. I would experiment with some of them, find the one that seems to be able to "see" the most, and then, if necessary, pay for the for-pay version to use in recovering your partition.

Some that I've tried the free versions of include Active@Partition Recovery (for the OP, there's also Active@File Recovery which I've also played with - it will generally find a lot of supposedly deleted files), Partition Table Doctor, and some of the other (free) utilities listed on this webpage. Another program I've had good luck with is Acronis Disk Director Suite, which can recover partitions.

 

I've only seen DoD with either 3 or 7 passes.

This is how DoD is described in Eraser's Help Topics. (Same as what Greg stated)

 

You can try Stellar Phoenix data recovery software. I have used it to recover my data. This software recover all my data back from my corrupted hard drive.May be it will help you. Firstly you can download its demo version which scans your drive and you will able to see the preview of your recoverable data. Once you see the preview go for full version to get your data back.