A hard drive is divided into various partitions, to use these partitions they are formatted. These partitions may be formatted into NTFS or FAT from Windows operating system and for Mac, they are formatted to HFS+ or HFSX file systems. If you are trying to format a hard drive, which has data on it, you should take certain precautions, to avoid loss of data, they can be listed as follows,
- Backup the data that is stored on the hard disk. Make sure that the back up file contains all your important data before you proceed with formatting of the hard drive. You may re-partition and format the hard disk, and then data on that partition will be erased.
- If your hard drive uses drive overlay software for supporting large sized hard disks, avoid using operating system setup program on the partition or format the drive if the software is not compatible with the operating system.
- If you want to upgrade the existing operating system to a latest version then you have to reinstall the operating system on the drive. Make sure that you have proper backup of the complete data on the drive. Some times, you may re-install your OS when there are problems like virus attack, system errors etc.
- Bad sectors are one of the reasons where in you format your hard drive. In this case the drive may go inaccessible and taking a backup also may become difficult.
How do I recover files from a formatted hard drive?
Even though you take the above precautions, your data may be lost in some situations, after format, re-format, and re-install of OS. To recover data from formatted partition, it is always better to use a good third party data recovery software.
Formatted partition data recovery software, allows you recover data from formatted, re-formatted, lost and deleted partitions. The software also lets you preview recovered data, before saving them.