While trying to free up unallocated space for a laptop upgrade, I accidentally formatted drive D: instead of drive E:. The formatted drive contains important university project files and website code. I'm using an 11th-generation Dell Inspiron and have already tried some recovery steps without success. What is the safest way to recover the data?
3 Answers
You can boot the laptop from a recovery USB created on another device, so you don’t have to install anything onto the formatted drive. A reputable Windows PE rescue environment may include several recovery utilities. Make sure the USB is prepared elsewhere, and recover any files to a separate external drive. If the drive is encrypted, physically failing, or showing unusual noises or errors, stop and use a specialist instead.
If the data is genuinely important, a professional data-recovery service is the safest choice. Recovery after formatting can be complicated, and experimenting with multiple programs may permanently overwrite parts of the files. Services can cost several hundred dollars or more and still cannot guarantee success, but they may be able to create a sector-by-sector image and work from that instead of the original drive.
First, stop using the affected drive immediately. Don’t install recovery software on it, save new files to it, or continue booting from it if you can avoid that, because new writes may overwrite the deleted data. Since the drive was formatted rather than merely having a few files deleted, recovery may still be possible if little or nothing has been written afterward. TestDisk is a free option for partition recovery, while tools such as PhotoRec can scan for files, but the recovered files must be saved to a different drive.
The drive contains my university projects and website code, so the files are extremely important. I tried TestDisk already but wasn’t sure whether I was using the correct tool.