How Do I Fix Accidentally Formatted Hard Drive? Easy Guide

Have you accidentally formatted your hard drive and lost important data? No need to worry. There are many ways to recover data from a formatted hard drive. We have prepared a guide to help you solve this problem.

Our guide will help you understand why it is important to format your hard drive and what you should do after formatting. We’ve created a step-by-step hard drive recovery guide that will help you learn everything you need to know about recovering a formatted hard drive.

When Should I Format My Hard Drive?

Formatting a hard drive means erasing all stored data and preparing it for new data and information. Usually, people format their hard drive before selling it or after using it. In addition to erasing all data, formatting your hard drive can improve its performance.

Since formatting can improve the performance of your hard drive, you can try it if you are having problems. Formatting your hard drive allows you to start from scratch. This will prepare the hard drive for installing the new operating system.

If your hard drive starts to fail, there could be many reasons. There may be a hard drive failure, inability to access data, strange sound, black screen, overheating, poor performance, hard drive not detected, etc. Many things can happen.

Your hard drive has firmware errors, viruses, malware, mechanical problems, corrupted files, and more. They may be. If you think this is the problem, try formatting your hard drive. Formatting your hard drive restores it to its factory state, so you can start over with a clean drive.

Solve an Accidentally Formatted Hard Drive?. What Should I do Now?

Almost everyone has formatted a hard drive at least once. This is a common mistake and you don’t need to worry about it. However, it formats the hard drive. What should I do next? The first thing to do is to stop using the device immediately. If you continue to use it, you may overwrite the deleted data with new data and lose it forever.

When you format a hard drive, it creates a new, empty File Allocation Table (FAT) that replaces the old ones. This marks the hard drive as free space for new data. However, your old data is not lost; it is simply not accessible through the file system. This means that if you don’t overwrite them with new data, you can still recover them.

3 Techniques to Fix Accidentally Formatted Hard Drive

If you accidentally formatted your hard drive using Quick Format and find that you need to recover your data, there are several ways to do it. We have prepared three easy ways to recover lost files from a formatted hard drive.

Method 1: Use Software to Accidentally or Permanently Format Hard Drives

The first and most effective way to recover data from a formatted hard drive is to use data recovery software. The Hard Disk Recovery Wizard is ideal for accidental deletion, hard drive overload, virus attack, disk corruption, computer crashes, partition loss and many other situations.
If you accidentally formatted your hard drive and need to recover your lost data, this is a safe and reliable solution to external Hard drive not showing up in disk management in Windows 11, 10, 8, 7, etc

Just Few Easy Steps to Resolve this Error

1. Download and install the hard drive recovery program.
2. Select the disk partition where you lost data.
3. Click the “Scan” button and wait for the software to finish scanning.
4. Preview the data recovered from the hard drive on the software panel.
5. Select the desired file or save the entire file.
6. Specify the location and save the file successfully.

Method 2: Using Backup Option

1. Open Settings on your computer.
2. Go to Update & Security and click Backup in the left menu.
3. In the Backup History section, click the Add option.
4. From the pop-up menu, select Restore data from an existing backup.
5. In the backup history window, select the files you want to restore from the formatted hard drive.
6. Then click the green “Back” button. Alternatively, right-click the “Recover” button and select “Recover to…” to set a new location to restore your data.

Method 3: Windows File Explorer 

Before formatting, make a copy of your hard drive.

1. Open File Explorer.
2. Find the drive you want to format in the menu on the left. Right-click it and select “Format…”.
3. A pop-up window will open where you can install the selected file. Check the “Quick Format” box and click “Get Started.”
4. This will be a quick format on your hard drive. Once this is done, your hard drive will be clean and ready to store new data. If you forget to back up your data, you still have a good chance of recovering your data after a quick format.

Conclusion

Don’t worry if you accidentally format your hard drive, USB drive, memory card, or other storage device. Do not use this tool or data recovery software to format your hard drive. After this, you will receive all your data back.