Recover a Formatted Drive with Recover My Files v3

[GDH]

Important:

On 31 August 2009, Recover My Files v4 was released. For information on how to recover a formatted drive with Recover My Files v4, please visit this post: Recover a Formatted Drive with Recover My Files v4

The following information relates only to the early version of Recover My Files v3.98

If you have formatted your hard drive you still have a very good chance of getting most if not all of your important files back with the full file and folder structure.

Please make sure you are running the latest version of Recover My Files.

You can download it from http://www.recovermyfiles.com; or by using this link: http://download.getdata.com/RecoverMyFiles-Setup.exe; or if you already have the program installed you can press the UPDATE button on the tool bar of the main program screen.

Run the program:

1. Select "Complete Format Recover" from the first wizard menu. Click "Next";

2. In the drive selection window, select and search the "physical" hard drive (a physical drive is actual physical hard drive inside your PC).

If you have two hard drives connected to your PC (e.g. an internal drive and an external drive), you will see two "physical" drives listed. Your C: usually resides on "0physical". You should be able to tell which physical drive you wish to search by the displayed size.

Place a tick in the box next to the physical drive that you wish to search, then click Next.

3. In the File Type Selection window, search ONLY for the default selected files types: .doc, .xls, .ppt, .bmp, .jpeg, .avi, .pdf, .wav. This file type selection is optimized to enable Recover My Files to locate the "Master File Table" (MFT), which contains the name and location of all files on your disk. Once this table is found, ALL file types will be recovered.

4. Start the search.

5. In the progress window you will see "Files Found = #" and "OS Items Found = #". When the Master File Table is located, the "OS Items Found" number will increase very quickly to a very high number. Each OS Item Found represents a file with its full file and folder name. The average hard drive has between 75,000 and 200,000 files on it.

6. When the OS Items Found number reaches a very high number, stops increasing, and remains constant, you can press the STOP button (on your average home PC you should reach this point within 2 hours of searching). The search will STOP, the results will build and display in "Folder View" of the results screen.

7. In the top left hand window of the Folder View results screen you should see your old folder structure. Start at the bottom of the folder list as this is usually where the most relevant folders are. Expand the folders with the + sign next to them and look for relevant files.

Folders with a Red X mean that the folder name was destroyed. However sub files and folders will still be ok, so also search these folders for relevant files.

8. In the right hand top window of the results screen, click on the files found to preview their content in the bottom preview window.

When you find what you are looking for, put a tick next to the file or folder to mark it to be saved (you can see the total number and volume of files selected in the bottom bar of the main program screen). To select groups of files, hold down the SHIFT or CTRL key, highlight the files with your mouse, and then press the SPACE BAR to turn the ticks on (or off).

9. Press the SAVE FILES button to save the files. You must purchase and enter a product activation key into the program before you can save files. Files MUST be saved to another drive, which can be a hard drive, usb, CD, DVD, or Network drive.

If the "Complete Format Recover" does not work for you, the next type of search to try is a "Complete File Search" of the drive letter, for your specific file type.