How to Unformat a Hard Drive and Successfully Recover Your Data on Windows PC

Accidentally formatted the wrong hard drive, or formatted it only to realize you needed some files? As long as the Quick Format option was checked, you can technically unformat the disk and recover your deleted files. How? Well, the sections below will take you through methods we’ve personally tested to successfully undo a hard drive format on our own drive. To maximize your chances of data recovery, act quickly and avoid writing new files to the drive.

Is it Possible to Unformat a Hard Drive?

In this article, we use the term ‘unformat’ to refer to data recovery after formatting a hard drive. Therefore, yes, it is completely possible to unformat an HDD. But, the success and chances of recovering files from a formatted hard drive will depend on three primary factors:

• 🧹 How the drive was formatted: If you formatted the hard drive using Windows Explorer and the Quick Format option was checked, data recovery from the hard disk drive is possible and fairly easy too. On the other hand, a full format (formatting with the Quick Format option unchecked) is impossible to undo because it writes 1s and 0s to each sector of your drive, overwriting any existing and deleted files in the process. In case the full format was interrupted or canceled, you can recover the files that weren’t overwritten. Thus, it’s important to know whether you performed a Quick Format or Full Format of your drive so that you don’t waste precious time and money unnecessarily.
• ⌛ Time elapsed since formatting: If you formatted the hard drive and installed a new OS or copied a lot of files since formatting, the amount of data recovered will be minuscule. This is because new data overwrites previous data on the drive, making data recovery impossible. It’s best to stop using the device as soon as you realize you accidentally formatted your drive, and attempt data recovery as soon as possible. Do not write any new files to the drive.
• 💽 Type of storage drive: No matter the drive type (HDD, or SSD), formatting erases all your data. But data recovery from SSDs is more complex, and often impossible. That’s because, unlike HDDs—which keep deleted files until new ones overwrite them—SSDs use TRIM, a feature that clears out unused data blocks that are ready to store new information. If you’re using an SSD, we suggest checking our guide on formatted SSD recovery.

How to Unformat a Hard Drive Using Data Recovery Software

Windows has limited options for backing up external hard drives, but it’s still worth looking for previous backups of your drive. Maybe you copied some files to your PC’s internal drive, or uploaded them to cloud storage?

Restoring a backup is the only guaranteed way of recovering all your files. If that’s not an option, then third-party data recovery apps are your only other DIY option.

In our recent data loss survey, nearly 80% users reported success when recovering their data using third-party DIY data recovery apps.

Files removed during a quick format technically remain on your drive until they’re overwritten, so these programs scan the file system’s metadata to find references to the removed files and then recover them. In case nothing turns up in the file system metadata, most apps also support RAW recovery, which scans your drive bit by bit to identify file signatures unique to each file format. Some programs can rebuild complete files from fragments scattered across the drive.

Let’s see how to unformat a partition, or a drive, using two leading data recovery programs:

Option A: Using Disk Drill

Here is how you can recover data from an accidentally formatted hard drive using Disk Drill:

1. Download Disk Drill and install it.
2. Open Disk Drill, select the formatted drive from the list, and click on Search for lost data. If prompted to choose a scan type, click on Universal Scan.
3. Click Review found items to view recoverable files. If you click on this while the scan is underway, Disk Drill will list the files as and when it discovers them. You can also click on the relevant file type tiles—Pictures, Videos, Audio, Documents, Archives, and Other—to filter the results right away.
4. (OPTIONAL) If you’d rather just recover all the files Disk Drill finds, without going through them first, click Recover all, pick a recovery destination, and click Next.
5. Expand the Deleted or lost, and Reconstructed sections to view recoverable files. The former contains files with their names and folder structure intact, while the latter lists files whose folder structure and filenames couldn’t be recovered—the files themselves are intact. Disk Drill will recover the original folder structure of your files only if the drive wasn’t reformatted to the same file system it had before.
6. Select the files you wish to recover. Disk Drill automatically displays a preview of the currently selected files—a flawless preview indicates higher chances of recovery. You can manually preview files by clicking the eye icon that appears when you hover your cursor next to the filename. You can also alternate between Tree View and Thumbnail View, or search for specific files/filetypes using the Search bar. Click Recover once you’re done selecting the files.
7. Choose a recovery destination for the files, and click Next. It’s best to recover these files to a drive other than the one you formatted, unless you’re sure you won’t need to recover any more data from it.
8. Disk Drill will recover the selected files.

With Disk Drill for Windows, you can recover up to 100MB of data for free. That’s usually enough if you just need a few key documents or smaller files back. The software also shows the recovery chances for each file, and you can preview the file before restoring it to confirm it’s still usable. Once you’ve tested the free recovery, you can decide whether upgrading to the paid version makes sense for recovering larger amounts of data.

Option B: Recuva

We only suggest Recuva for users only looking to unformat a hard drive for free.

Steps to unformat a hard drive using Recuva:

1. Download Recuva and extract it.
2. Open Recuva and click Next on the welcome screen.
3. Select the file types you want to recover. If you want to recover multiple file types, leave All files selected. Click on Next.
4. Select the In a specific location option, click browse, and select the new partition created after formatting your drive. Click Next.
5. On the next screen, check the Enable Deep Scan option and click on Start.
6. Wait for Recuva to scan the formatted drive.
7. Select the files you want to recover, then click the Recover button.
8. Choose a recovery destination and click OK. Recuva will restore the files to the selected location.

What to Do When You Need to Unformat an Internal Hard Disk?

As for internal drives, what you do depends on whether the drive was a system drive (the drive on which Windows is installed), or a non-system internal drive.

If you formatted an internal system drive:

Internal system drives can really only be formatted during a Windows reinstall, or when booting from an external drive like a USB.

Regardless, here are your options to unformat a drive on which Windows was installed

• If you have a Windows backup on another drive: Finish installing Windows if you haven’t yet, then restore the backed up files using Windows File History, or Backup & Restore.
• If you don’t have a backup and haven’t reinstalled Windows: Connect the drive to another PC as an external drive or boot from a bootable USB drive, and recover your data using a professional data recovery program. Most good data recovery programs have bootable versions.

If you formatted an internal non-system drive:

Data recovery after formatting is usually less cumbersome for non-system drives:

• If you have a backup: Restore your files using Windows File History (only works if you’d selected folders from this drive while setting it up), or use Backup & Restore.
• If you don’t have backups: Use data recovery software to scan the drive. The steps will remain the same as they are for external drives.

FAQ

Conclusion

It’s good practice to frequently back up your data, because it’s the only way to be 100% sure that you’ll get back deleted files after formatting. Choose a backup method that works best for you—it could be a third-party backup tool, built-in Windows utilities, or manually copying important data at regular intervals.

Each data loss scenario is unique, and there are various factors that influence the success rate of recovering data after formatting a drive. If you feel stuck at any point, don’t hesitate to ask for help in online communities like the r/DataRecoveryHelp subreddit. You can also post details of your problem in our own online community, where readers and experts can offer you tips and point you in the right direction.