Is it possible to recover data from a formatted external Western Digital Hard Drive?

[rafa the asasin]

I recently started to have issues with my external Western Digital Hard Drive which I decided to format and I want to know if I can recover all my data from it
using a data recovery software.

Hope you can help me with it.

[Ensign Tzap]

Try Recuva.
http://www.piriform.com/recuva/download


Signed: Ensign Tzap

[darrenpalmer]

Originally Posted by rafa the asasin

I recently started to have issues with my external Western Digital Hard Drive which I decided to format and I want to know if I can recover all my data from it
using a data recovery software.

Hope you can help me with it.

rafa the asasin per chance was it a western digital mycloud drive I did the same but it's some other format I would like to recover it. I think it might be Linux.

[Digerati]

I want to know if I can recover all my data from it using a data recovery software.

No. You will not be able to recover "all" your data but maybe, if lucky, some of it. But it most likely will not be in any format you will recognize, unless it was plain text documents.

Much depends on the format method used, A "Quick Format" would just rebuild the master file tables (MFT) leaving all the data files on the disk. But a "Full Format" would cause the drive to touch all the storage locations, potentially clearing the spaces.

I agree that you can try Recuva, but your chances of recovering anything usable are slim, at best and go down from there if you attempted to save anything to disk after formatting.

[darrenpalmer]

What happened was my WD mycloud drive was acting strange so I wanted to reinitialize users and accidently hit drive so everything was erased I disconnected the drive and tried get data back NTFS but it didn't recognize the drive so it has sat till now. In reading on line I see the mydrive has a linux OS running the drive so I imagine the info is on there in linux not ntfs but I don't have a linux box and don't know linux to load one and do recovery so I was hoping for a windows based recovery for linux drives. Does that make sense?
I have used GDB ntfs on windows drive and recovered working files meaning exe still executed and installers still installed. so I was hoping to be able to recover pictures and movies in working order

[Digerati]

NTFS is the file system used to format the drive. Linux is the operating system the enclosure uses to control the drive.

If me, I would remove the drive from the enclosure and attach it to my computer as a secondary drive and attempt to recover the data.

[darrenpalmer]

that is what I did sorry if that was not clear I thought I could just attach it as an external usb drive but that's when GDB NTFS would not recognize the format.

[Digerati]

I meant to attached it internally as secondary drive via SATA or IDE, not through an enclosure.