Hello,
As a favour to a friend, I am attempting to recover a hard drive which was “quick formated”. The user removed the hard drive from it’s enclouser due to physical damage to the micro-USB port and with a universal USB adapter accidently reformatted the file system over top of the WD file system that was holding his files in an encrypted state. From my research, I believe the filesystem was ext3, but the software is unknown to me to be able to enter a password to recover these files.
My Book Essential - WDBAAF0010HBK
Currently the hard drive has a NTFS Filesystem and I want to know if it is possible for me to format the hard drive to the standard file system that the My Book was intended to use, and install the software required to remove the encrypted files so they may be recovered. This is a long shot, but I figured after all my research I would give these forums a post before I attempt to do anything with the hard drive.
I have attempted to use recovery software, but due to the fact the files have been encrypted, nothing can be recovered with the tools I used. Since the hard drive was only “quick formatted” I was hoping that it might be possible to recover some of the files that may not have been over-written in the processes made by the user in an attempt to read the drive.
If anyone can provide any direction for me to take a look in, before I reformat the drive and risk losing everything for good, I would really appreciate it. Please let me know if you would like me to clarify anything, as to help you understand the issue I am dealing with.
Thanks for your time!
