It appears that Smart Data Recovery is no longer freeware. They are now charging $50 USD.

Huh, that’s disappointing. Thanks for letting me know.

hi!
can anyone please help me? just two days ago, i accidentally removed my UsB disk in its port and when I reconnected and tried to open it, a window says, “disk not formatted. format now?”. So basically, I can’t open my USB and i feel like all my files will be gone forever… can u please give me a step-by-step procedure on how can i possibly restore all the files in my USB disk? do i need to quick format it now and then try to restore it?
thank you!

It sounds like you removed the USB drive while it was in use, and now it requires that be formatted before you can use it again. Unfortunately I’m not sure if there is a way around formatting it.

So when a file is deleted it is only removed from the table of contents, but the actual content of the page remains intact until the operating system decides that it needs to use the space for something else. These programs will flip through all of the pages looking for things that are not in the table of contents but still appear on a page.

Hopefully you get the analogy because it is the best one that I can come up with.

About a week ago, I used one of the program in this post, restoration, to restore 2 of wrongly deleted .avi movie files (about 700MB large each). I did the restoration just after the accident. Although the files are recovered, when I tried to play the file in WMP, it’s said that the file is corrupted or something like that. I tried using VLC player and also it doesn’t work. I even tried using Video fixer to fix it. After fixing, somehow, the file plays some other mp3 files stored in the same drive. Although I have given up restoring that,I would like to find out if anyone has any idea for this kind of situation? (just in case for accidents)

P.S.: The restoration’s program files are installed into other drive in order to avoid overwriting as instructed in download page.

When the files are that large it is very likely that the operating system would have started using that memory space already. This would work best for smaller files (probably under a few MB).

It depends on how the drive was formatted. For example, when installing Windows if you do a “quick format” then it won’t go through and overwrite data, but the “long format” will. If the data has been overwritten it will be unrecoverable. Basically if the drive was formatted in a minute or so then it had to be the quick format, because the “long format” takes quite awhile to complete.

Claus: You mentioned a few good programs that look pretty nice. I’ll have to look into them!

Do you guys know if this recovers files from formatted drives? Thanks!

On several occasions, I have successfully used PCIFR to recover the data off a freshly/”accidentally” re-formatted NTFS Windows 2000 system. Formatting generally just wipes the file structure information–not the actual files–so it isn’t a secure way to clean a drive.

So long as the formatted drive hasn’t been reformatted and new file/system information written to the drive (or zero’ed out)–the original files should be in very good shape.

(Like Ryan says…save the recovered files to another drive/usb/media device so you don’t damage the very files you are trying to recover!)

If the drive contents have been “securely” deleted with a file-wipe program ( Darik’s Boot and Nuke (Hard Drive Disk Wipe) )…then none of these will help you very much!

I’ve had good success with PCI File recovery.

In fact, if you install that application, you can then copy the program-folder that is created to your USB stick and then run it from there. So, while it isn’t ‘automatically’ portable, it can be made so easily.

I also have found it can be slow in performing the scans and the interface is a little confusing to navigate until you have used it several times.

But it gets the job done.

Based on your recommendations, I’m going to download and try out the Smart Data Recovery program as I also like the idea of the “Explorer” file listing format.

Two other freeware file-recovery applications you might want to consider:

SoftPerfect File Recovery - http://www.softperfect.com/pro.....erecovery/
It has a very simple GUI.

ADRC Data Recovery Software Tools v1.0 -
http://www.adrc.net/data_recov.....index.html

It actually contains a number of useful tools: Undelete Files, Copy Files (recovery), Raw Copy,
Image Backup / Restore, and Boot Builder (import/export boot section of drive).

I haven’t had a chance to use either of these applications…since PCIFR has met my needs, but these might be worth looking into next time as well!

P.S.: The restoration’s program files are installed into other drive in order to avoid overwriting as instructed in download page.