Once a HD has been formatted is there any way of getting any info back off off it ??????

 

Yes, I used Ontrack Easy Recovery Professional after formatting a drive 3 times It recovered 99% of the data.

 

you have PM mate

 

is there still such a thing as a high or low level format how ever that is done & does that prevent recovery?

 

Yep a lowlevel format effectively zeros the drive, and makes it much more difficult to recover any data.

 

anybody else ????, or anybody know where I can get a copy of Ontrack Easy Recovery Professional for the price of pint lol

 

A low level format is a reasonable first effort to stop a drive being recovered. However, most modern software will circumvent that and be able to look at the residual magnetic signature that the media can still provide.

It is best to use a dedicated program to do the job. This will write to all areas of the drive with zeros, then to all areas with ones, then again with zeros. You choose the number of passes, but 3 is a minimum. That should stop all the casual data recovery people

 

How easy data is to recover essentially boils down to how much money you want to spend. If you are the police with a lot of money, then just about the only way of preventing at least some data recovery is to physically melt the platters. The FBI has recovered data from platters that have been smashed, so a little reformat is nothing. But obviously such an exercise is pretty expensive.

A lot also depends on the type of format: an normal format can easily be undone - DOS used to have the command UNFORMAT. Guess what it did. But if you did an unconditional format, or a low-level format, them more specialist tools are needed, as indicated above.


M

 

I used an application recently called Getdataback, the demo read the formatted disc and showed what it could recover, I bought the licensed copy on the strength of that and lost no information.

 

there was a tele program on a while back about selling used harddrives
on ebay ..and how easy it was to reclaim bank details from them

i would rather destroy it with a hammer myself rather than sell it

i few details is all thats needed to create visa cards and alike

 

all software on this site is free

http://www.freebyte.com/filediskutils/

you my find a link or what you need on there

 

Yep,as Dunk has mentioned,Ontrack Recovery Pro has worked several times for me too.It's especially useful at recovering files from disks that windows can't even recognise plus I've recovered data from wiped hard disks too - Just make sure you don't use the disk in the meantime though to avoid any more data getting overwritten so to speak...

Good luck

 

I tend to find converting the partition to some strange format before erasal works well. When people are recovering the data they do not expect it to be in some strange Linux format or whaterver.

Well, it confuses the hell out of me anyway