• The Vault - Help & Advice

    This is a collection of articles written by us from
    2014 onwards that offer help and advice to readers
    about issues we encountered with equipment that
    came to us for recovery.

    This section is not maintained.
    Information in the articles was correct at the time
    they were written but may now be out of date.

Recovering data from Format & Fdisk

Explanation: The Format and Fdisk commands are typically run to prepare a new hard disk for use – enabling the installation of an operating system, application programs & eventual user data. The two commands have been around for a long time, formerly they were stand alone DOS programs before being integrated into Windows.

Symptoms: Where previously the computer would boot and be usable, systems that have been Formatted or FDisked often report the following errors: (these errors are frequently displayed on a black screen with white text)

  • No boot device
  • Operating System not found
  • Primary Hard Disk not found. Press F1 to Continue
  • Master Boot Record Not Found
  • Invalid or corrupt FAT
  • Invalid partition table entries
  • Invalid sector
  • Cannot find file or program
  • Invalid command.com
  • Primary/Secondary Hard disk failure
  • Non system disk
  • Disk error

Recovery possibilities: Data Clinic are usually able to successfully recover greater than 99.9% of the data from Formatted &/or FDisked drives.

Do Not: Under no circumstances should you run a Fimages utility such as Scandisk or Chkdsk. It”s also very important that nothing else is done to the drive – the best option is to power down and remove the drive from the machine. Click to read more about the use of Scandisk and Chkdsk in data recovery

Note: When installing / upgrading computers, the next step after a Format or Fdisk is often to install an operating system, if this has been done please refer to our data recovery from re-installed operating system (or Ghosted image) page.

What should I do?: Call the Data Clinic and talk your problem through with us on 0800 151 2207, or fill out out the callback form and we’ll call you back