Was i right or wrong ??!

[vee6]

I'll try to paint a picture ....

I was usng a 250GB HDD as a back USB drive. I purchased a NETGEAR NAS drive ( Network Attached Storage)

Thinking that i could just place the drive into the caddy and everything would be great.. well .. i was wrong.

The netgear s/w required me to attach the drive to the network. Thinking nothing of it i said yes .. at this point the Netgear s/w proceeded to format the drive. Realising that i had 250GB of memories etc etc that was going down the pan , i flew accross the room and pulled the power 2-3 seconds into the format.

Question is was i right or wrong to do this ?

If i now plug the drive into USB the message i have is 'the drive is not formatted , do you want to format now'? ... will the DRS recover the data from this point or will i have to 'quick format' the whole drive and proceed from there.? Many thaks in adv

[GDH]

Sorry for the delay in responding to you.....

Do NOT quick format the drive or you could make things more difficult to recover.

The first thing you should try is....

• download Recover My Files from www.recovermyfiles.com, or click here: http://download.getdata.com/RecoverMyFiles-Setup.exe;
• Run a "Fast Format Recover";
• In the drive selection window (second wizard screen) you should see your a 250gb "physical drive" listed. Select this drive by putting a tick next to it;
• Start and run this search. It will probably take a few hours to run on such a large drive.

I expect that this search will get all your files back with full file and folder names. The results will be shown in "Folder View" of the results screen. Click on the files here to make sure you can preview their content in the preivew window, and if you can, purchase an acivation key to save your files.

If this search does not work, you need to next try a "Complete Format Recover". Search the physical drive for the default selected files type ONLY. This will be a longer search so you may need to run it overnight - but it will get all you files back with full file and folder structure.

Please let us know how you get on.

Thank you.

[vee6]

finally after 3000+!! minutes the search is complete. I had to do a full format recover as the fast format recover found nothing at all.

FAT32 Start Sector guess 119520
Found 4618 directory entries in FAT partition 1
All searches completed.
A total of 12779 file(s) were located.
Time Elapsed: 3272.79636666667 (mins)

The software has located 12000 + files... all well and good but as you suggested was expecting to find the 'Folder View' populated with the file structure, this sadly is blank.
the prieview on any of the JPG , bmp , gif etc etc files is corrupted too..
Most of the filenames are 'Recovered File .......jpg' does this mean the files although are there are in fact corrupted and unrecoverable ?

I have tried to save the 'recovered files' to a different drive but the pictures for example do no open.
I exported the list to CSV and there appears to be some filenenames. i can email this to you if it helps any
also at the bottom under the 'Event Log ' it says 12779 files ( 17.9 Gig) . that is way way lower than what is on the drive ! more like 179 GIG

[GDH]

Hi

These results are a bit strange. Please send me an email with your contact telephone number and I will give you further instructions.

Thanks