Forum Discussion
How to recover formatted external hard drive using cmd?
I’ve been in that situation before — once you’ve formatted the drive, stop using it right away to avoid overwriting data. You can try this data recovery software, it’s super easy and works great for recovering formatted drives:
Check this tutorial: https://www.ulitewin.com/recover-files-from-formatted-hard-drive
I actually used this tool to recover my important project files — got so lucky!
Recovering a formatted external hard drive using Command Prompt can be a bit tricky. So, be super careful when identifying your external hard drive in Diskpart. It's easy to confuse the disk numbers, especially if you have multiple drives attached. Before you start issuing commands, double-check the disk number. Always double-check! You don’t want to accidentally wipe or mess with your main system drive.
Sometimes, your drive might be set to read-only because of various reasons—hardware, system settings, or file protections. Before you start trying to recover files, you might end up banging your head against the wall if you don’t clear the read-only attributes. The Command Prompt command for this, as I mentioned before, is:
attributes disk clear readonly
If you attempt a quick format thinking it’ll make things easier, you could be digging your own grave. Quick formatting doesn’t erase the data, but it removes the file table, making recovery harder. If you’ve started down this path, stop!