Q: Can I recover data from a formatted disk?

A disk can be formatted in two different ways: Normal and Low-Level (physical) format.

Normal Format enables you to format a disk, by initializing the file system information of the partition.

For EXT2/EXT3 file system partition, there are two situations:

First, Formatting the ext2/ext3 file system partition in order to convert it to a FAT or NTFS partition. If this occurs, restoration still can be realized with "Complete Recovery" mode as the data area during this proves to be still intact.

The other one, user formats the ext2/ext3 file system partition and later on still keep the same file system. As this operation badly destroy the Super block and inode which has crucial importance in overall file system and pointing to the exact files. This process is too destructive for data on partition, so only the "RAW" option is available and possible to recover the data.

Finally, Low-Level Format modifies the surface molecule arrangement, initializes the entire disk, and records sector identifiers to each track (creating addresses to identify sectors within each track). All of the data contained in the disk is initialized, preventing any future recovery attempts.