By Geek -
If you start to format the hard drive and then find out that it is the wrong drive, press "Cancel" immediately, and then go for the reset button (if your computer has it). If you do not have a reset button, keep in mind that a power button has a five second delay before the shutdown occurs. Wall socket plug may be a better option.

There is a significant technical difference between Quick and Complete format, but we'd rather discuss the timings for now.

If you are doing a quick format, most likely pressing "Cancel" and reset would be of no use because you do not have time for it, but you should try anyway.

In case of a complete format (with Windows Vista or Windows 7, which actually overwrite the data during the format)

  • on the FAT filesystem the file allocation table is lost very quickly and then folders are progressively lost. Loss of the allocation table makes subsequent unformat attempts difficult and causes the loss of all the fragmented files. Further loss of folder records makes the recovery next to impossible even though the file content may still be there.

  • on the NTFS filesystem, the MFT (Master File Table) is typically located starting at 3GB offset and takes up about 100MB. The typical disk write speed is about 30-60 MB/sec, 3GB are thus filled in about one minute, after which the MFT is lost, making the recovery next to impossible. Modern SSDs with write speeds about 300MB/sec cut the available time to like 10 seconds.


All in all, the conclusion is that you better double check what drive you are going to format.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

QNAP revisited

By Geek -
For reference, we were using QNAP TS-639 Pro with six WD20EADS disks. After about half a year of use, the web-interface was running slower, so that we needed to wait for several minutes to obtain the list of the disks. Gradually, we noted that the array performance decreased significantly. It seemed obvious to assume that one of the member disks has been dropped from the array and a RAID5 was working in the degraded mode. However, all the member disks were marked as GOOD in the web-interface. It was suspicious that LEDs on the disk bays indicating the state and activity of the disks were blinking unevenly. Logically, for RAID5 one should expect almost symmetric load on the disks, but in fact, one of the disk LED was blinking much more frequently. Once we had run the bad blocks check on this disk through the web-interface, the disk dropped from the array in less than half an hour and its bay LED turned red. At this point, the web-interface began to work properly again. The disk taken fr
Read more

APFS Data Recovery

By -
Apple File System, APFS for short, is a brand-new filesystem released in 2017. The goal is to replace HFS+ which has been in use on Apple computers since 1998. Formally released in late 2017, APFS filesystem began to be used by default on Apple computers running under MacOS High Sierra. Among the main features of APFS filesystem are 64-bit pointers allowing to address 2^56 blocks More accurate created/accesses/modification time measured in nanoseconds since 1970-01-01 Copy-on-write Sharing blocks between APFS volumes Native full-disk encryption We are happy to announce that now ReclaiMe data recovery software is capable of recovering data from APFS-formatted devices be it a USB thumb drive, or external hard drive, or internal SSD boot drive. You can download the latest build of ReclaiMe at www.ReclaiMe.com .
Read more