Retrieving data from an initialized HDD

WD External and Portable SSD External SSD for Windows
1

Hi guys,

I did something terribly stupid to my WD HDD and hope that there is a way to undo it.

I have a 1TB WD My Book Studio external HDD (with a WD10EADS drive in it). I used a FAT 32 file system on it and had about 500 GB of data on it.

For a stupid reason, I disassembled the external HDD and put the actual drive into a Windows XP PC. There I clicked to “initialize” the drive.

Only too late I found that this deletes the master file table and that I thus won’t be able to access the data any more.

Do you have any suggestion how I could the data back?

2

You can potentially use data recovery software to do that. I long time ago I used software called The Disk Doctor which could replace the partition table and then recover the files.

Good luck!