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I have an old laptop which was bought in 2007. It was formatted 3 times. Is there anyway of recovering some files from the status in the first time? I really need old photos that was saved there.

Felipe Viero Goulart
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  • Have you searched this site before you asked your question? What about https://superuser.com/questions/148326/formatted-d-partition-by-mistake?rq=1 – Solar Mike Aug 02 '17 at 18:22
  • Start by checking the disks SMART stats, and if its healthy, try TestDisk, to recover the entire partition with its filesystem. If its not healthy, try DDRescue to make an image of the disk, and try testdisk on it. If Testdisk won't work, you will have to resort to tools like Recuva or Easus. If those don't work, file carving utilities like Photorec can be fruitful, but you will lose information like the files name and its folder location (those bits of info are in the filesystem metadata which isn't recovered) so they are a last resort. – Frank Thomas Aug 02 '17 at 18:33

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Very possibly. Formatting a drive rarely touches the actual data on the drive. However, if you mean “formatted and reinstalled Windows” then it’s likely at least some of this data has been overwritten.

There are numerous file recovery tools out there for every OS. My personal recommendation that I have had success with in the past is to boot the laptop from an Ubuntu live CD/thumb stick and use PhotoRec. Good luck.

Darren
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