The cause · a format aimed at the wrong disk
Which format ran? That one answer caps everything else. Nine times out of ten it was the quick sort: the index gets swapped and the files stay put, which is the mild end of data loss and generally means folders home again with their names and dates. A completed full format is a different conversation, better had on the phone than after postage has been paid for. Nottingham, Derby, Lincoln, Leicester — the wording of the call hardly varies: somebody hit Format on the wrong disk. Stop there and ring us. Nothing is charged for the assessment; cards and sticks are £250 + VAT, a drive £300 + VAT, and on most jobs you are billed nothing at all unless the files come back.
Ask an engineer, and the first look is free
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| What it looks like | What usually causes it | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| A format box appeared, and you clicked through it | A blank new index now sits where the old one used to be | Underneath it the files are untouched — so leave it alone |
| It opens up empty, with every byte reported as free space | The listing was swapped; whatever it used to point at has not budged | Nothing more gets written to it |
| A full format taken through to the end | Since Vista a full format writes a zero into every sector, and there is nothing inside a zero | There is nothing underneath to find |
| A full format interrupted part-way | Anything the zero pass failed to reach is still whole | Halt it and pull the power |
| clean, typed into diskpart | Strips off the partition table, nothing further; the volumes below are untouched | Recoverable, as a rule |
| clean all, typed into diskpart | Every sector gets a zero — the same ending as a full format left to complete | Zeros, and nothing else |
| An SSD given a quick format | TRIM has gone out, and cells are being emptied by a controller nobody instructed | Unplug it now |
Your device picks up a case number the day it arrives, and an engineer then establishes what has genuinely gone wrong — at no cost, and ahead of everything else. Two things come back to you together: a plain account of what can be lifted and what cannot, and one fixed figure in writing. Agree to that figure, or turn it down and pay nothing.
Was it clean all, or clean, or a full format, or a quick one — and did it finish? The ceiling on what can be read back is set by that, so an engineer establishes it before anybody talks about your chances.
Everything is done against the image, and your own disk is never written to. What survives of the old file system is separated from its replacement and reassembled. Read enough of those records and names, dates and the original tree all return with the files.
With nothing structural left, files are identified by the header each type opens with and taken off the image whole. Where a surviving record still names one, that name goes back with it.
The file list reaches you before any invoice does. Say yes and it is billed; say no and it is not — and on most jobs, if nothing comes back there is nothing to pay. Whatever comes off goes home on media bought in for your case, carriage at our end. Nothing here is closed until you have opened those files on your own machine.
Put plainly: good news, and usually a short job, is what a quick format on its own amounts to. The reverse is a full format that ran out, or clean all typed at diskpart: deliberately, a zero now sits in every sector, which is how Windows has worked since Vista, and there is nothing underneath to search for. Ask any firm offering to undo one exactly how it means to do that. Our answer arrives ahead of any figure, and it costs nothing.
One tower, two 2TB disks of the same model — and the format landed on the family archive rather than on the spare. Because a quick format does no more than lay down a fresh index, everything beneath it was still sitting where it had always been. Nothing further had been written to that disk, so the archive came off exactly as it went on.
Normally the lot. On a hard disk all a quick format does is write out a fresh, empty index; the sectors underneath are never touched. Nothing of yours has moved — only the catalogue naming it has been swapped over. Provided nothing else is written to that disk, most of the tree returns with names and dates attached.
Only where a full format ran right through to the end. Since Vista that pass puts a zero into every sector it crosses, while a quick format writes none at all. Most of these jobs are settled by that single distinction.
Turn the machine off, keep that disk out of use, and get an engineer to image it before anything else goes near it. From here on, every file saved lands on top of something that could still have been read.
No. TRIM normally goes out within a second of an SSD being quick-formatted, and the controller then empties the freed blocks with nobody asking it to. Cut the power and ring. Waiting costs you more on this one than on any other format job that comes in.
The look costs nothing. What comes back to you is a file list — what opened, what did not — plus one figure to finish the job, in writing, before anything chargeable begins. Most jobs carry no fee at all unless the data comes back. Leave the drive switched off until you have that list.