“I was doing a full format of drive D. It was half-way through the completion process that I was shocked to see I was formatting drive E instead of drive D. I panicked and in the heat of the moment, I hit the cancel button and shut down the system. Now, when I turn on my PC, the hard drive seems to be raw and all the space appears as unallocated. Is there a way to fix my hard drive and get the data back?”
When a hard drive formatting process is canceled half-way, whether intentionally or accidentally, there are chances that your hard drive may turn RAW and that’s exactly what has happened here. Often, the drive may not show up in My Computer listings, causing the system not to work partially. So, what can be done in such a situation? Is it required to format the drive completely? Don’t worry, there is a viable solution provided here that answers all your queries.
Here’s The Solution
Since the entire drive shows as unallocated space, you cannot format the drive without creating partitions. That’s because the information of the partitions stored in the partition table will be wiped off and hence a huge lump of unallocated space on your drive. The drive behaves almost like a new disk where you need to assign the file system and create partitions all over again.
However, it is also important to avoid loss of vital data from the drive that was unintentionally tried to format. Once you try to allocate the partition table and create partitions again, the data that is still residing on the drive will be no more available. So, basically the solution is a two-step procedure; firstly – to recover data and secondly – to fix the hard drive that doesn’t show up.
Step 1) Data Recovery from unallocated Hard Drive:
To get your data back from the drive that was half formatted, you have to use the finest data recovery software. But, be aware that, since you have canceled the format mid-way, the file system might be affected hence, 100% data recovery might not be possible in this case.
However, I would recommend you to use Yodot Recovery tool, which assures maximum data retrieval from formatted/reformatted drives. The software does a deep scan of the affected drive and restores the data in the same hierarchical tree with zero damage. It also comes with a ‘save recovery session’ which allows you to pause and resume the session whenever you want without having to scan the drive for partitions all over again. Refer this article on how to get data back after formatting laptop drive for the detailed step-by-step guide.
Step 2) How to Fix Hard Drive whose format was cancelled mid-way:
Since the drive is RAW and space is unallocated, you have to format and create partitions through Disk Management Tool. Below is the detailed instructions;
- To launch Disk Management Tool, from Start menu, open Run dialog box and type msc and hit Enter.
- Now, right-click anywhere on the unallocated space and select ‘New Simple Volume’
- In the ‘New Simple Volume’ wizard click Next.
- Enter the volume size in megabytes (MB) or accept the default size and click Next.
- Choose a drive letter or accept the default drive letter to recognize the partition and click Next.
- In the Format Partition window select the option to format and assign the file system to NTFS In the same window check the box which says ‘Perform a quick format’.
- Repeat the steps to create multiple partitions
Now that you have fixed the drive and have your partitions back, you can now securely restore the rescued data. And make sure that you always keep a backup of files on an external hard drive or you can even use any cloud services as well. Also, check twice on which drive you are formatting. Or you can write down the drive letter to avoid confusion before formatting.
