How to Recover Formatted Hard Drive on Mac and Windows

Jose Henline
time June 16, 2017 Preview 2.9K
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“How to recover data from formatted hard drive? I have a WD 1TB hard drive. I formatted it on my Mac by accident and lost all my data. Does anyone know how to recover formatted hard drive, all 400GB data of it?” –From Chris.

When you format a hard drive, you will find all files missing on the drive. So before you want to format your drive, backing up your data is highly recommended. If you accidentally format it, you can also be able to recover data from it. In this article, I will show you how to recover files from formatted hard drive.

Things you should know before recovering formatted hard drive

Do not add new files to formatted hard drive

When you format a hard drive or delete some important files by accident, please keep in mind that don’t add any new files to it. And the best way is to stop making any changes on the drive until you recover all data from it. This will avoid data overwritten and you still have chance to get all lost data back.

Why it is possible to recover formatted hard drive?

Formatting a hard drive does not erase the data on it and only hides files and remove them from the visible folder. That means your files are still kept intact at the original place on the formatted hard drive. So recovering data from the formatted drive is realistic.

To recover files from formatted hard drive, you need a data recovery app that can help to get all lost files back by yourself. And do not to install data recovery software on the formatted hard drive. Follow the guide below to recover formatted hard drive as soon as possible.

How to recover data from formatted hard drive

A large number of data recovery software that are designed to recover data. Which one is the best? After I tried many data recovery software like Wise Data Recovery, Wondershare Data Recovery and Undelete Plus, I found Cisdem Data Recovery and Recuva are highly recommended to try because of their powerful data recovery capacity and stable performance.

How to recover formatted hard drive on Mac

Cisdem Data Recovery is one of the best Mac data recovery software for users to recover photos, videos, documents, archives, and audios from formatted or corrupted hard drives, SD cards, iPods, USB drives, digital cameras, etc. It also supports HFS+, FAT16, FAT32, exFAT, ext2, ext3, ext4 and NTFS file systems. Try it below to recover data from formatted hard drive on Mac.

Free Download

Step 1. Launch Cisdem Data Recovery for Mac and select the formatted hard drive.

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Step 2. Click "Search for lost files", go to Type and check the files in specific folders, or you can use the filter tool to quickly search files.

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Step 3. After scanning, choose the recoverable files from the scanning results, preview and click "Recover" button to recover them. Then choose a location to save recovered files.

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How to recover formatted hard drive on Windows

To recover files from formatted hard drive on Windows, Recuva is a perfect choice. It is a free data recovery app that recovers data from corrupted, damaged, and reformatted hard drives. Try it below and recover formatted hard drive on your Windows computer immediately.

Download Recuva for free!

Step 1. Open Recuva on PC and choose the type of file you want to recover. Here you should select “All Files”.

Step 2. Choose the formatted hard drive to scan. And click “Next”. In order to find most possible recoverable files, please enable Deep Scan. Then hit “Start”.

Step 3. When scanning ends, all found files from the formatted hard drive would be displayed. You can click each file or search them by filename to preview. Then select the files you want and hit “Recover…” to recover them from formatted hard drive.

Generally, you can get your data back from any formatted hard drives by following this article. If you have any questions on how to recover formatted hard drive, just leave us comments at the bottom part.

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Jose Henline
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Jose specializes in reviews, how-to guides, top lists, etc. on PDF, data recovery and multi-media. On his spare time, he likes to travel or challenge some extreme sports.

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