How to Recover Data After a Wrong Ghost Restore, Accidental Format or Deletion, a RAW Disk, a Bad Disk, or a Drive That Keeps Asking to Be Formatted

The photo folder is 117_11 and the file is 8760WLK.GHO, about 9GB.

Now let’s create a wrong Ghost restore. A wrong Ghost restore usually means restoring with Disk from Image as in the steps below, instead of Partition from Image to write only to the system partition C: (test C).

I restored the 8760WLK.GHO file from the USB drive to the whole 128G SSD mentioned above, and everything got merged into a single drive, drive L:, shown in the image below.

As a result, all the remaining partitions (Test D, E, F) disappear, along with the data on them, when you access the drive from Windows Explorer. This case is very simple to fix. quangloi37 posted a guide on this before, but because its images are broken and the tool used was Disk Genius, I changed things a little and use Portable Partition Guru, which is convenient and easy to use on Windows or in a rescue environment such as WinPE.

In the main window, identify exactly the hard drive that was wrongly ghosted. Here I right-click HD2, choose Search Lost Partitions and select the whole disk (whole Disk). You can tick the 2 checkboxes to speed things up, then click Start to begin.

Very quickly, the software finds the first result. That is the single partition that Norton Ghost merged everything into earlier (of course). Choose to skip it and continue.

The next result returns the first partition of the hard drive, 44.7G, which corresponds to the old drive C: before the “wrong” Ghost restore. You can see that its contents are those of the new Ghost file. Choose Reserve to restore it (note that the data on drive C: is the new data).

The next results return the remaining partitions with their data intact, even the partition names and partition sizes (see the program’s main window). You can see the photo folder and the GHOST file I copied there earlier as examples. Click Reserve again to restore them.

After you have restored all the partitions with their data, choose the following command from the menu to save the result:

2. Recovering Data After an Accidental Format or Deletion, or Simply Recovering Data on a Drive That Still Exists for Any Other Reason

This time I’ll format the Test D and Test E partitions and try to recover the data. There are many programs that can recover data after an accidental format; here I’m introducing Disk Getor Data Recovery V 3.28. After registering the software successfully, launch it, choose the last option, FullScan and Recovery, and click Next

In the next window, choose the exact partition you need to recover data from; here I choose Test D, which I just formatted. In the file type section, select everything to maximize the chance of recovery.

Wait for it to finish scanning; since there isn’t much example data, it’s quick. Also, I’m doing this on an SSD; if you do it on an HDD, it will take longer.

In the results window, you’ll see 2 sections. The first is RAW file, where you can view files by the format you need. I use the image format JPG as an example. You can view other formats the same way. Pay special attention here: you won’t find the files you need in the old folder structure (in my case, after formatting, the original photo folder was gone, although in specific cases some or all of the similar folders may still exist, so judge for yourself).

After you find the data you need and have double-checked it, select the folders and files you want to recover, then choose Recover to send them to a different drive (don’t save to the drive being scanned that contains the data you need to recover). Here I send them to the Desktop because it is on the system SSD, not the SSD I’m testing data recovery on. You can see that the photo
folder is missing compared with the original structure and only the Ghost file is left, but these photos can be found in the RAW files section, so pay close attention to this detail.

If you need a more thorough and detailed search, you can select the whole hard drive for a Full Scan instead of scanning just one partition. In this case, the results returned are actually more comprehensive and detailed. The RAW files section will then find more (because the results cover the whole hard drive). However, since the results are more detailed, you’ll also have to search more manually for each partition you need to recover data from

Again, wait for the scan to finish completely:

Finding files works the same way as above, it’s just a bit more work

3. Bad Disk: A Drive So Damaged That Data Can Only Be Read Off It, Most Software Can’t Access It, and Windows Explorer Keeps Asking to Format It.

Here’s a real example. A female customer brought in a laptop that had been dropped while running, and the computer couldn’t boot. I removed the drive and plugged it into a 3.0 box (currently worth <200,000 VND).

Although the box supports 3.0 and the laptop has two 3.0 ports, I recommend plugging it into a 2.0 port to reduce stress on the HDD and make data recovery easier. If the computer has a charging port, you can use this 2.0 charging port first to give the hard drive better power while it spins (the image above is for illustration only; if anyone wonders, the port on that side of the 8770W is actually a 3.0 port).

When connected to the laptop, Windows Explorer tries but fails to access it and keeps asking to format it. You should just ignore it rather than trying or attempting to format it again.

Partition Guru freezes when it tries to access the drive. Many other programs I tried to open either froze or couldn’t see it.

You
can see DiskGetor froze when it tried to access the drive:

Often, even Disk Management and Partition Guru can’t see it:

EASEUS’s efforts are useless. Although it can access the drive, the scan found NO data. I knew this in advance from the same company’s partition manager, which doesn’t handle damaged partitions well enough.

Only MiniTool Partition Portable below displays the drive normally, but as a Bad disk (shaded black). This is why I chose a MiniTool product to recover the data for the customer, even though I normally don’t rate this brand’s data recovery software highly. However, note carefully: this is not a case of accidental formatting or deletion but of an incident (a failure), so the structure and data are still intact, which is why I felt I could trust this solution.

I’ve explained why I quickly chose this recovery software. It’s Minitool Power Data Recovery. In the software’s interface, choose Damaged Partition Recovery.

Great. The list of partitions (including the partition names) appears next. Since the customer needed the data on the Setup partition recovered first, I chose that partition to scan first. Very quickly, the scanned file counter started going up:

While it was still scanning, I tried another program as an example; it couldn’t see this bad-disk drive at all and only “saw” my system and USB drive.

The scan seems to be going smoothly, with lots of files found:

After the scan finished, all the data in the Setup partition on the damaged drive showed up in full. All I had to do was Save it to another drive (this time the system Desktop, for speed and safety, then copy it to an external portable hard drive afterward).

It was a success, and the customer went home very happy. Note that I call her a customer because a few years ago she bought a laptop from me, and now that it had been dropped she asked me to recover the data (of course I didn’t charge for the recovery). It’s not that I charged her for the recovery and that’s why I call her a customer, folks 

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Some important notes:

1. Don’t try to scan with several programs at the same time; it slows down the scan. Choose the most suitable program to use, or combine them one after another.
2. With a damaged drive that keeps asking to be formatted like the one above, I found that MiniTool Power Data Recovery scans very “smoothly” without causing the drive to be detected on and off, which is why the results were excellent. However, if you carelessly run a scan alongside one other program (just one, not even several) that keeps trying to access the drive and makes it get detected on and off across the whole system, you’ll only damage the drive further, which may make it impossible to access or recover, and cause MiniTool’s scan to fail. Also, Windows Explorer itself keeps asking to format the drive; you should “ignore” it like I did, because if you try, the result is no different from other programs trying to access the drive. If necessary, you can temporarily kill Windows Explorer from Task Manager first and turn it back on after the scan finishes, no problem 

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BONUS:

Along with this data recovery post, I have one more thing to share.

When you run into a case where using an “ancient” partition manager often found on Hiren’s boot cd, or any other reason, which may cause unwanted partition management errors, then when you open various familiar partition managers you may see the old partitions with data, or unsuported t

Then you don’t necessarily have to recover the data off it. That day I used TeamViewer (because I was busy) and tried several programs, but none of them could get the partitions to show up. At that point I chose MiniTool Partition Wizard, and sure enough it fixed it. The fix is very simple. Use a better, more powerful partition manager to resize the damaged partition (preferably shrinking it from the beginning). This forces the software to create a new, standard partition table, so the new partition will show up normally. We shrink from the beginning to make sure the beginning of the partition that was damaged by another “faulty” app earlier is removed (this is the cause of the error, and other “weak” programs can’t handle it afterward). Once it’s shrunk and shows up, do the same with the other partitions. After that’s OK, resize and merge however you like.

One more small tip: when a partition is too full, many partition managers can’t resize it and show a “not enough free space” message, but MiniTool Partition Wizard can still do it. It’s also fast and safe for your data. This is another reason I recommend this software. It has a Portable version you can use directly on Windows and in WinPE, so you don’t have to worry about whether it’s available.

I’ll just give an example with a few images below. Suppose the first partition of the hard drive is damaged: I only need to resize it by trimming a little off its beginning and click Apply, and I get a new, shorter partition with a new “head” and exactly the same data as before. Of course, once it’s done, this partition shows up normally as if nothing had ever happened:

This same software can also convert between Dynamic Disk and Basic without losing data, for anyone interested. I once helped a customer “rescue” a drive after they installed Ubuntu without knowing it well, which created too many partitions, and of course the drive became Dynamic, so the data couldn’t be read on Windows. The fix was to put it in a box, delete some and merge the “faulty” partitions Ubuntu created (don’t touch the data partition), so that there are no more than the 4 original basic partitions, then convert it back to Basic Disk, and it’s OK.



Final Part: Discussion:





After I shared this topic in a Facebook status, I received a few comments saying that Active@ File Recovery recovers very well, 99% or even 100% of the data. I had DiskGetor scan the whole SSD first, then scan the Test D partition above separately. In the whole-drive view, the RAW file section found more than with Test D alone (which makes sense). I took a result found by both, an *.MP4 file. In the image below, the file size is 262.49M.

What about the scan results with Active@ File Recovery? It found some, but these results are definitely not the same as DiskGetor’s. It looks like we have nothing at all.

From the main view (I tried a full scan of the whole drive), we can see that MP4 is not a priority category.

The MP4 file above is not corrupted and plays very well (no errors right to the end of the file) after recovery:

Many more similar MP4 files:

That’s it for MP4. What about image files? My personal assessment is that DiskGetor lets you Preview each file directly, has an option to filter duplicate files, and is better at filtering out corrupted files. Active@’s Preview is poor (broken images, you have to view files one by one, and there are many corrupted duplicates). However, Active@ seems better for images in that it supports many other small to very small miscellaneous files (on the SSD I tested, these files were all junk, but in some specific case they may well be useful, so we shouldn’t ignore them when needed).

What about the quality of the files after recovery? I only tested with a Ghost file. After formatting and recovering it, both tools gave good quality, and the compared results were identical:

One more thing: Active@ scans a bit faster (probably due to different algorithms; of course, the results returned are about the same).

From the small example above, with very, very little data compared with many real-world cases, it’s hard to conclude which software is better, or to say what recovering 99% or 100% means, as some of you have shared. I really hope to keep receiving comparison test results between your favorite programs and the solution I’ve partly presented above, so we can keep looking for better solutions.