A quick format rewrites the index and leaves the contents exactly where they were, which makes a formatted hard drive one of the more hopeful jobs on this bench — provided very little has been written to it since. A full format is the opposite, and this page is honest about which is which before you spend anything.
A quick format leaves the data where it was. One drive or SSD is £300 + VAT, cards and pen drives £250 + VAT, after a free diagnostic — and logical work carries no fix, no fee.
Formatting is one of the few genuine accidents in this trade, in that it is almost always done deliberately and almost always to the wrong thing. These are the six ways it reaches us.
Setup lists drives by number and capacity rather than by any name you would recognise, and two disks of the same size take one click to confuse. The install then writes its partitions over the top. What survives depends on how much of the disk it filled afterwards.
A card that suddenly has to be formatted before it will work again is usually a card with a damaged file system, not an empty one. Agreeing to the format stacks a second problem onto the first. Take it out of the camera and leave it out.
You plug the disk in and are told it needs formatting before you can use it. That message means the file system cannot be read, not that the drive is blank. It is the commonest single way people lose data that was still entirely intact.
Quick formats finish in seconds, which is half the trouble, since it is done before you have finished reading the box. The file table is replaced and the contents underneath are not, so the recovery is usually good if the disk is left alone from that moment.
A full format writes zeros across every sector and verifies as it goes, which is why it takes hours. Afterwards there is nothing left to find, and the same applies to a secure erase or an SSD sanitise. We tell you straight when this is what happened.
The format itself is rarely the fatal step. Installing an operating system on top, restoring a backup onto the same disk or working on it for a fortnight is what removes the free space. Every write has to land somewhere.
A quick format writes a new and empty file system onto the volume: a fresh boot sector, a fresh master file table on NTFS or a fresh allocation table on exFAT and FAT32, and a directory containing nothing. It finishes in seconds because that is the whole of the work. Every file that was on the volume is still physically present in the same sectors, simply unreferenced. Recovering it means reading the disk sector by sector, finding the old file records and the file signatures that survived, and rebuilding names, folders and dates from whatever remains. A full format is a different operation entirely. It writes zeros across every sector and verifies them as it goes, which is why it takes hours rather than seconds, and afterwards there is genuinely nothing to recover. Windows has defaulted to quick since Vista and the box marked Perform a quick format stays ticked unless somebody unticks it, which is the reason most formatted drives arriving here turn out to be recoverable.
The two get muddled constantly and they damage different structures. Formatting works inside a partition and replaces the file system held in it. Repartitioning works on the disk as a whole and rewrites the partition table, the small record at the front of the disk saying where each volume starts and stops. Delete and recreate partitions and the volumes themselves are untouched at first, but the map to them has changed, which is why a repartitioned disk often shows as one large empty volume or as unallocated space. Both are recoverable in principle and they need different approaches, so it helps enormously to tell us which one happened. Where a volume has gone missing rather than been emptied, the partition recovery page is the closer match, and a drive Windows now calls RAW belongs on the RAW drive recovery page.
A drive asking to be formatted the moment it is connected is telling you something, and it is almost never that it is empty. It means the file system on it can no longer be read, because the boot sector is damaged, the file table is corrupt or the partition entry has been lost, and Windows is offering the only remedy it knows. The data behind that damage is generally sitting untouched. Accept the offer and the damaged structures are replaced with empty ones, so you now have a formatted drive recovery stacked on top of the corruption you started with. The same holds for a camera, a drone or a phone insisting a card must be formatted before it will shoot again, and for a NAS offering to initialise a disk it has stopped recognising. Say no, take the media out of service, and let the diagnostic report what state it is genuinely in.
This one arrives regularly and it is worth being clear about what decides the outcome. Windows setup identifies disks by number and capacity, not by the label you know them by, and where two are the same size the mistake costs one click. Setup then creates its partitions and writes the system files, and everything it writes goes over whatever occupied that space. What matters afterwards is how far the installation got and how much of the disk it filled. A 500 GB drive carrying a fresh 30 GB Windows installation at the front still holds most of its previous contents behind it. The same drive after a fortnight of updates, downloads and a restored backup holds considerably less. Stop using the machine, take the disk out, and send it before anything further is written to it.
Do not format it a second time to put it right. Reformatting, changing the file system, running CHKDSK or restoring a backup onto the same disk all write into the space your old files are still occupying. Everything that helps happens on a copy, never on the original.
Do not format it again, and do not try a different file system in the hope it takes better. Do not run CHKDSK. Do not install recovery software onto the drive you want back, and if you do run something yourself, write the program and its output to different disks. Do not restore a backup onto the formatted drive; use another one, so that if the backup proves incomplete you still have the original to work from. And on an SSD, do not take your time about it: a format on solid state storage can trigger TRIM across the whole volume and clear the blocks within minutes, which is the one scenario on this page where speed genuinely changes the answer. Deleted files on healthy hardware are covered separately on the deleted file recovery page.
Recovering a formatted hard drive is logical work on hardware that is usually in good health, so it carries no fix, no fee cover: nothing back means nothing to pay. Where a drive turns out to have been formatted because it was failing in the first place, that is electronic or mechanical work and stands outside the guarantee, at 50% of the quoted price upfront. The figure for a single drive or SSD is £300 + VAT, and £250 + VAT covers a memory card or a USB pen drive. There is no collection service, so the media is posted to Manchester Data Recovery, Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN, roughly 35 miles from the city and next working day by tracked post. Drives reach us for this one from all over Merseyside: students in Kensington and Wavertree who wiped the wrong disk at two in the morning, photographers in the Baltic Triangle who formatted a card halfway through a shoot, small firms out at Speke and Aintree who reinstalled over a year of accounts. The free diagnostic closes 2 working days after arrival, and most completed recoveries take 2-4 working days once you have approved the written figure.
Stop writing to the disk, leave the second format alone, and start the free diagnostic today.
Nearly everything on this bench arrived by tracked, insured post. It is the calmest way to move a failing drive, and a parcel handed in anywhere on Merseyside is normally on the bench the next working day.
Still screwed inside a laptop, tower, MacBook, iMac, server or a CCTV recorder? Take the drive out and post that on its own. We do not strip machines here, and any computer shop will do it in a few minutes. The one job nobody can take on is flash soldered straight to a logic board, as on Apple Silicon Macs and a handful of very slim laptops: if the storage will not unbolt, there is nothing to send.
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Address it to Manchester Data Recovery. It is roughly 35 miles from Liverpool along the M62 if you fancy the run, and next working day by tracked post if you do not. We ring or email the moment it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes 2 working days after that.
Not sure what belongs in the parcel? Call 0800 689 0668 before you tape it shut, or step through the free online diagnostic first.