Windows needs to format your disks in order to prepare it for keeping data such as files and folders. When Windows formats a disk, it does not wipe off its entire contents as you might believe judging from the time it takes to complete the formatting. Instead, it simply creates new, empty file system records at the beginning of the disk. The lengthy time is spent on checking the disk for errors to ensure that every sector on the disk can read and write correctly, marking the bad ones in the file system. Once again, unless you perform a low-level format from the system BIOS (and you’ll never do that), all the original information is left intact on the hard disk. The formatted disk appears blank because there is no record in the newly created file system about the files and directories that were originally stored on that disk.

If your original file system (not the new one!) was NTFS, download and install 1st NTFS Recovery, run the installed application and select the formatted partition when prompted. That’s it! 1st NTFS Recovery will take care of the rest.

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