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Sorry for the long title, but I got a serious problem that I couldnt fix even after hours of search and recovery through recovery software. At this point I dont even know if its even possible to recover the lost data.

A relative of mine had given me a half full (250gb of 500gb) old MacBook Pro HDD from 2011, and I formatted it to NTFS and installed windows on it. Overall, I only used about 15gb of the harddrive, an have only started windows once or twice on that machine, so I dont think the harddrive has be overwritten much. Now I would like to recover the stuff I had prior to the Windows installation, but no disk recovery software could find any data, only some windows files. (I tried EraseUS, R-Studio and recoverit)

My only question now is: is it even possible to get back my data and if yes, what is there to do?

Im Thankful for any advice!

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    Chances are very slim that you can recover data because the file structure has been overwritten. You could try Recuva (Piriform) or Getdataback (runtime.org) or if really important go to a local recovery company for assistance
    – anon
    Commented Jan 4, 2020 at 14:05
  • You might do better trying the same set of tools on a Mac, as it will at least understand the old HFS format.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Jan 4, 2020 at 15:00
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    Any files overwritten cannot be recovered, any that have not been overwritten have a chance of being recovered by a professional.
    – Moab
    Commented Jan 4, 2020 at 16:06

2 Answers 2

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No direct answer. Recovery process are hit and trial.

I was in the same situation as yours around 2 years back and difference was that I formatted the NTFS drive to ext4 and wanted to recover files from NTFS filesystem. I can't recall exact thing that happened but will give some tips

Please proceed with these at your own risk . I am not a expert in this so please follow with caution and I will not be responsible if things go wrong

Try all possible options at each step

  1. Use Testdisk .Written for NTFS but works for HFS too. Use the Testdisk manual Try all possible steps here

Other two are highly uncertain

  1. If the above doesn't work try deleting partition and follow Recovering deleted partition using TestDisk

  2. Lastly try creating new HFS filesystem and then try recovery process from HFS filesystem

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You will struggle massively to do this.

Depending on the type of data you are looking to recover photorec (part of the testdisk suite of tools) may be able to recover some data (but not filenames or file structures). This can work for things like images and office documents - but depends a lot on fragmentation if the disk at the time the files were written. As its looking for signatures of known file types on the raw block device you will also get a lit of deleted files, and sorting this out can be very time consuming. There will also be a lot of corruption.

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