has anyone got any recommendations to recover files from a formatted hard drive. Dont want to buy one that doesnt work well.

thanks in advance

have you written anything to the drive since it was formatted?

fraid so…

Then your chances of getting anything off of it is greatly reduced.

http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php

I’ve had good luck with data rescue as well.  I believe the lab’s that do data recovery services might be able to do this.  You send the hard drive off to their lab, but they cost $$$.  When my HD got toasted, I sent it to i365, and I got lucky… they were able to do a fully recovery.  There’s a number on their site that you can call up to discuss your scenario, and they might be able to give you a quote.

Intruder - 02 January 2010 12:34 PM

Then your chances of getting anything off of it is greatly reduced…

Doesn’t it depend on how much was written, and what (if anything) it overwrote? If the drive has a few free gigs, maybe it’s OK, or at least not disastrous, on that point.

Scot, I think it’s worth at least trying some (free trial) data recovery apps, IF — but ONLY if — you can run them on a separate Mac with yours in target mode.

Once you get this resolved to whatever extent possible, please do buy at least one external drive. They’re becoming ridiculously cheap, especially compared to the prospect of what you may have to do now. Even if you’re not up to a systematic backup regimen for a bootable clone or two (pretty simple in Super Duper or Carbon Copy Cloner), Time Machine can still work wonders in most cases for at least your home folder.

Good luck, man.

Rocky Mac Rescue is good. They only deal with Macs, which is more important than you might think if you’ve ever dealt with others where Macs are still about 3% of their business. http://rockymacrescue.com

thank you for the advice, got photo’s off with data rescue. I did actually do a time machine backup of the drive but it failed when I tried to recover the backup but it didnt backup iPhoto library. I was too eager to use the old drive in something else (before making sure I had all the data I needed). I am syncing data to a PC now and then using Mozy to back everything up. I thought I could trust time machine but it got it wrong this time

Count me as another vote for Data Rescue. I’ve had the most luck with that one in the past.

First thing I would like to mention that we should stop writing on hard drive as soon as we recognize a hard drive failure or data loss.

Secondly, there are so many third party data recovery software available online. The software line Stellar Phoenix Mac data recovery, data rescue etc are well capable to serve your purpose.

ronal dross - 13 January 2011 04:07 AM

First thing I would like to mention that we should stop writing on hard drive as soon as we recognize a hard drive failure or data loss.

I wanted to highlight this excellent point: Do NOT trust a drive that has previously shown signs of physical issues. That’s not to be confused with filesystem corruption that can be fixed with Disk Utility’s “Repair Disk” or other, similar tools. But a drive that has shown symptoms of true physical damage should be copied and canned.

ronal dross - 13 January 2011 04:07 AM

First thing I would like to mention that we should stop writing on hard drive as soon as we recognize a hard drive failure or data loss.

Secondly, there are so many third party data recovery software available online. The software line Stellar Phoenix Mac data recovery, data rescue etc are well capable to serve your purpose.

Would be nice of you to mention that stellarpartitionmanager.com is the website listed in your profile.