Best Ways to Recover Files from Formatted Hard Drives [2025]
Last Updated on September 20, 2025 by Yulia Ilina
If you accidentally format the hard drive and lose important files and data, don’t worry, the formatted hard drive is not a complete loss of data, and it can still be recovered. Recovering a formatted hard drive cannot be done through simple Recycle Bin or Trash, because the file format is generally relatively large, and you need other methods to help you. This article will provide you with 2 different methods of recovering formatted drive data, and you can choose according to different situations.
Part 1: Why It's Possible to Recover Formatted Hard Drive
When you format a hard disk, you do not delete the data on the drive, but mark the storage space on the drive as usable space, which can be used for new data to replace the storage space of existing data. During this process, the actual data remains on the drive until it is overwritten by new data. And even if new data starts to be stored, the original old data will be fragmented and stored in unallocated space. But what you need to pay attention to is that as time goes by, the storage space of data fragments will become smaller and smaller, and will gradually disappear, and the possibility of successful recover formatted drive data will also become smaller and smaller.
Part 2: How to Recover Formatted Data from Hard Disk Using CMD
Recovering deleted files via CMD is useful in various situations. For a formatted hard disk, files cannot be recovered through Recycle Bin or Trash, and are marked as permanently deleted. In this case, you can try to use CMD to recover formatted drive data.
Step 1: On your computer, right-click the Start icon on the desktop to bring up the corresponding shortcut menu, and select Command Prompt (Admin) or Windows Powershell (Admin) in it to open the CMD function window.
Step 2: Enter chkdsk *: /f in the prompt window of the command prompt, where * represents Hard Drive, just replace it with its name. Click the Enter key to run this command.
Step 3: After the command finishes running, enter the hard drive name again, and then enter attrib -h -r -s /s /d *.*, click the Enter key, and wait for the command to finish running again. After the run is complete, a brand new folder will appear on this drive to hold all the files, saved in .chk format.
Part 3: How to Recover Data from Computer Hard Drive
When the data has not been completely covered, it is still effective to use CMD at this time, but when the data is broken into fragments and there is no storage space, the recovery difficulty is also the greatest. You need to use data recovery software to deeply scan the hard drive to recover the file data in the hard drive. Aiseesoft Data Recovery offers several features that make it effective in restoring data from a formatted drive.
1. Scan the formatted drive for traces of the deleted data, even after the formatting process.
2. Supports a wide range of file systems, including NTFS, FAT32, exFAT, and APFS.
3. Prevent data loss and ensure you can recover files in case of accidental deletion or other data-related issues.
4. Preview the recoverable files enables t to recover, rather than restoring all data from the formatted drive.
Step 1: Install Aiseesoft Data Recovery on your computer and start it. On the main interface of the software, you can see the files that can be recovered, including files in various formats such as documents, videos, audio, and emails. Because you need to restore the data in the hard drive, click the Check All File Types to fully detect the files.
Step 2: If it is a hard disk drive connected to the computer, select the hard disk that needs to recover data in Hard Disk Drive, and select it in Removable Drives if it is external. After the selection is complete, click the Scan button to start a quick scan of the hard disk.
Step 3: After the quick scan is completed, click the Deep Scan button to start a deep scan, to comprehensively detect the hard disk and provide more recoverable data. After the scan is complete, you can select all the files in the left sidebar at one time, click the Recover button, and all the data in the hard drive can be recovered.
Conclusion
When the hard disk is formatted, you need to stop using the hard disk immediately, so that the possibility and integrity of data recovery from the formatted hard disk will be greater. When the data has not been completely covered, CMD is a very good way to directly extract and save the file from the hard drive, but when the data is completely covered, Aiseesoft Data Recovery may be your last way to recover formatted hard drive data, because it can deeply scan the sectors in the disk, providing you with the option of file recovery to the greatest extent.