Recover unpartioned data

M

MarineCorps

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 20, 2007
Messages
166
In a bonehead move by me I unpartioned a flash drive I had that had a lot of stuff on it that I'm not sure was backed up. I haven't formatted the thing yet but is there software to recover the photos that were on there?
 
TestDisk would be my first recommendation but, it's not quite a point-click type operation.

If you recreate the partition precisely as it was before (I'm going to assume the entire USB stick was one big partition), and you do a QuickFormat - it MUST be a QuickFormat - of the exact same file system without any alterations of the cluster sizes, etc, that as soon as you're done and you unplug/plug the drive it, the contents that exist on the drive may (and that's the iffy part) reappear as accessible files.

It sounds odd but, it actually works in more cases than not but it's up to you. You'll need data recovery software if you decide to pass on that method, and that's was TestDisk is. Not all "data recovery" software works as advertised; most of it is just designed to locate files that were sent to the Recycle Bin and deleted from there because Windows still keeps a record of the files as long as they went to the Recycle Bin first.

But that's not the situation you're in because of the entire deletion of the partition info itself, hence data recovery is necessary now with a tool that actually does such a task.

GetDataBack is another one that gets recommended frequently but it's commercial software and the trial version doesn't get the data back, just locates it and tells you if it's recoverable. TestDisk is open source, free, and does it all.
 
Partition Find and Mount might work for you. I've used it a few times to pull up old partitions.
 
Thanks. I recovered most of the data and the stuff that I didn't recover wasn't improtant enough to me to care about it's loss
 
And I just realized days later that the same group of folks that makes TestDisk also makes PhotoRec that leans more directly towards specific file types like images, videos, etc. It's free as well.
 
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