How to recover folders from formatted drive
I had 500GB portable hard drive. it fell from the table and when i joined it was not showing any data and asked me to format it. i did format. Then again it was not functioning properly so i had to quick format it again.
Now i had lots of data in it. Is there any software which can recover my files and folders with same structure as original
Solution 1:
Use a data recovery live CD. I recommended Parted Magic. 1st off before any further damage is done create a disk image using something like ddrescue (included in the live cd). Then from that image of the disk you can run recovery tools. I recommend using TestDisk and PhotoRec, which are also on that live cd.
I have successfully used the above method to recover files from a Mac that was accidentally reformatted to NTFS and had windows installed over OSX.
Solution 2:
There are a number of tools to recover files from a formatted disk both free and commercial. A quick search for disk recovery software will give you a fair amount of choice but I haven't tested these so I won't recommend any particular tool.
What I would like to offer is a few things to keep in mind in this situation.
When you quick format a drive it doesn't touch your files, all it does is zero out the index of which files you have on the drive. They should be recoverable as long as you don't write new files to the drive.
With no index the recovery tools usually have to figure out file sizes on their own and this fails sometimes so you might get corrupted files after the recovery. What I've seen is small files where the tool couldn't find the end so after the recovery they ended up several gigs.
Your drive is probably damaged in some way since Windows could not recognize it and asked you to format it. With physical damage the recovery process can easily hang or take a very very long time to complete.