 | By Fred Langa Unintentionally reformatting a drive is one of the biggest mistakes you can make on a PC, but it doesn’t have to be a total disaster. With care, you just might get everything on the wiped disk or partition back the way it was. |
What to do when you reformat the wrong drive
Stephen Yale had what he aptly describes as an “aaaargh!” moment:
- “I had a 750GB external USB drive connected [to my PC]. I inserted a small 32MB thumb drive to reformat from NTFS to FAT32 and use as a boot disk. I went through the process of formatting the drive whilst talking to a colleague on the telephone. Inadvertently, I formatted the 750GB external USB drive instead of the thumb drive. Aaaargh!
“What can I do — if anything — to recover the data from the drive? Am I hosed or is there a chance of recovery?”
In fact, the increasing use of digital cameras is making this type of error more common. You see, when you “initialize” a camera’s memory, you’re really formatting a solid-state hard drive. (Most cameras use utterly standard FAT16 or FAT32 disk formatting.)
People who would never reformat a PC’s drive will almost surely “initialize” or reformat a digital camera’s solid-state drive many times over the years they own the device. Sooner or later, almost everyone will have a reformatting “aaaargh” moment!
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