Formatting does not scrub a disk clean, whatever most people have been told. A quick format replaces the index and leaves every file exactly where it was written, which is why so much of it comes back. A full format is another matter entirely, and so is whatever the drive was used for afterwards.
£300 + VAT for one drive or SSD, NVMe included. A format is a logical fault, so it keeps no fix, no fee. The free diagnostic closes 2 working days after the drive reaches Guildford, and the figure is fixed in writing before any work starts.
The word format covers several quite different events, and the gap between the best and the worst of them is enormous. These are the six that arrive here from Bracknell, Wokingham and the office parks along the A329.
The default option in Windows, and the best case anybody on this page can be in. It writes a new and empty file system at a handful of known locations and leaves the rest of the disk exactly as it stood. Every file is still present, described by nothing at all.
Since Windows Vista, clearing the quick box writes zeros across the whole volume as well as checking it. Left to finish on a 2 TB disk that is hours of overwriting, and what it covered is genuinely gone. Stopped part way, everything beyond the point it reached is untouched.
The installer lists disks by number and size rather than by the name you know them by, and the second disk in the machine gets picked more often than anybody admits. Windows then lays down a fresh partition layout and several gigabytes of system files across the front of it. Most of the disk is never touched.
The message saying the disk in drive E needs formatting before you can use it is a symptom, not an instruction. It appears when the file system cannot be read, which on an ageing disk usually means bad sectors rather than a formatting problem. Agreeing to it stacks a second fault on top of the first.
Cameras format on request and occasionally on their own after a write error. Most of them write only a new file table, so the images stay where they were and come back by their content rather than by their names. Shooting one further frame is what does the real damage.
A disk that was formatted and then filled with a new operating system, a photo library or a game install is a different job. Whatever landed on top of the old contents is permanent, and the recovery becomes a search of the gaps around it. How much was written matters far more than how much time has passed.
A file system holds two kinds of information: a catalogue recording which file owns which blocks, and the blocks themselves. A quick format writes a new and empty catalogue. On NTFS that means a fresh master file table at the usual offset, a new boot sector and a clean map of free space; on exFAT and FAT32 it means new allocation tables and an empty root directory. None of that reaches the region where your data actually sits, which on a disk of any useful size is well over 99% of it. The recovery job is to rebuild the catalogue from what remains, and there is normally far more left than people assume.
NTFS is generous. It keeps a record of every file in a structure that a format does not fully erase, and enough copies of directory information survive that most jobs of this kind come back with folder trees and original file names intact. FAT32 and exFAT are harsher, because the directory entries are fewer and simpler and a format replaces exactly the part that held them. There the files are recovered by signature, meaning the software recognises the shape of a JPEG or a DOCX and rebuilds it, and what you get back is complete files under names like file00417.jpg. APFS and HFS Plus sit somewhere between the two and depend heavily on which metadata copies and snapshots happen to have survived.
Repartitioning changes the map of the disk rather than the file system sitting on it, which is why converting a disk from MBR to GPT, or deleting one partition to make two smaller ones, is often more recoverable rather than less: the data is entirely untouched and only the description of where volumes begin has changed. Wiping is the opposite. A secure erase, a disk cleaner set to overwrite, or a reset that zeroes the drive is doing deliberately what a full format does incidentally, and none of that is a recovery job at all. Working out which of the three actually took place is the first thing the free diagnostic answers.
On a spinning disk a quick format leaves the data physically in place, and the drive keeps handing it over until something writes on top of it. Solid state storage behaves differently. When a volume is formatted the operating system usually issues a TRIM command telling the drive that every block in it is now free, and the controller responds by clearing those blocks in the background over the following minutes. Ask for one of them afterwards and the drive returns zeros, not out of awkwardness but because there is genuinely nothing left to read. On an SSD or an NVMe drive the window between the format and the loss is short, and the most useful thing available to you is taking the power off rather than sitting and thinking about it. There is more on that behaviour on the SSD recovery page.
Writing to the drive comes first. Reinstalling Windows onto it, copying the holiday photographs back to see whether it works, installing recovery software onto the very disk it is meant to recover: each one occupies free space that still held something. Second is running a repair. chkdsk on a freshly formatted volume is being asked to tidy a file system that is supposed to be empty, and it does that job well. Third is the second attempt, where a disappointing first run leads to the drive being formatted again, or to a partition manager being pointed at it. Every attempt is another set of writes, and they land exactly where the old content is waiting.
The drive is imaged first, sector for sector, and every conclusion afterwards is drawn from that image rather than from your disk. This matters even on a job that looks purely logical, because a fair proportion of formatted drives turn out to have been formatted for a reason, and the reason was frequently a disk beginning to fail. Old file system structures are then located across the image, the previous volume layout is reconstructed from them, and where the catalogue cannot be rebuilt the remainder is carved out by file signature so the two sets of results can be compared. You see a list of what came back before any money changes hands.
Any single hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT with NVMe included. Memory cards and USB sticks are £250 + VAT, which is the band most camera cards fall into. Arrays, NAS boxes and servers start at £500 + VAT. Formatting is a logical fault, so it keeps the guarantee. The network wording does not vary: No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Should the diagnostic find that the drive is failing mechanically as well, the terms follow that fault instead, and you hear about it before anything is agreed. Post the drive by itself to Guildford Data Recovery, Building 2, Ground Floor, Guildford Business Park, Guildford GU2 8XH. From Bracknell it is about 40 minutes down the A322 and the A3, or next working day by tracked post, and reception takes drop-offs during office hours. No part of this network collects and there is no counter in Bracknell.
Unplug it, leave it where it is, and find out what survived. Diagnosis costs nothing and the written figure follows it.
Almost every drive on this bench arrived in a padded box. Tracked post is the gentlest way to move a disk that is already in trouble, and a parcel handed in around Bracknell is usually in Guildford the next working day.
Is the storage still bolted into a machine — laptop, tower, iMac, MacBook, rack server, a DVR under the till? Free it first and send the bare unit. Stripping hardware is not something this lab does, though it is ten minutes' work for any repair shop on your high street. There is a single case with no way round it: memory chips soldered flat onto the mainboard, which is how Apple Silicon machines and certain ultrabooks are built. Where the storage cannot be unbolted, there is no parcel to make up.
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The name on the parcel wants to be Guildford Data Recovery. Driving it over from Bracknell is roughly forty minutes on the A322 then the A3; posting it costs you a stamp and a day. Either way, a message goes out to you as soon as it is logged onto the system, and two working days later the diagnostic is finished.
Unsure whether something should go in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 while the lid is still open, or work through the free online diagnostic and let it tell you.