When a computer formats a drive or over writes information on a hard drive is the data that was on there gone forever? How does data recovery work?
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tata30
ANSWERS: 3
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The term "reformatted" is used for two different operations. A "low level reformat" really destroys the data. It is just possible that some very high-tech equipment available only to disk drive manufacturers (and possibly security agencies) might recover it, but basically it is gone. However, many people use the term "reformat" to refer only to writing a blank directory to the disk. In this case, the data is still ther, and it is only the pointers to it that have gone. Similarly with deleting a file: the action of deleting it simply removes the pointer to the file, but does not (at that time) destroy the data. Only when the space is re-used and the data overwritten is it actually gone. Data recovery works on the basis that the directory is the most likely part of the system to be trashed, either because it is the most used or someone accidentally deleted something. Id searches the free space for file fragments and tries to reassemble them.
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I'm not following you around; I just happened to spot this. Did your sister actually *format* your drive? That would be a serious bummer, considering that she would have done it with her Macintosh. Formatting and overwriting data are two separate processes. Formatting marks each data block as available for storage. At that point, most of the existing data (yours) would still be there. It would take some recovery skill to extract it, and you wouldn't get all of it (the formatting puts holes in it). After formatting, when she began writing her own data to the disk, the operating system and drive controller would direct the data to begin filling the blocks marked as available--ignoring any pieces of your files that still remained. There is no predicting which of your files would be overwritten (replaced by her files). If she formatted the disk for the Mac and then began storing her files onto it, I would guess that the possibility of finding any of your files intact is minimal.
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When a computer formats a drive, it makes it ready for use. Any information on the drive is removed (formatted). It is possible to reverse a format, but this is best left to data recovery specialists.
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