Hello, this is my first message in this community and I'm not too sure if it should be posted in this section or not. I have a 1TB external hard drive I use for backup purposes with only 1 NTFS partition. I formated that partition by mistake today with diskpart performing a quick format. From which I've read after a quick format it's possible to recover the data stored there. The MFT is the metadata part where the file name, creation date, access permissions, contents, ... are registered; and it's mirrored (there's a copy of it somewhere in the disk). What I don't know is if a quick format erases that MFT mirror too, I hope not. I'm running a program to recover files on it but I'll have to save the files to another location (once it's finished scanning, ~9 hours from now) and I don't quite have around 900GB of free storage where to put the data. If I can't resolve it in any other way but I can recover the contents I'm planning on buying another 1TB hard drive to use as destination. However I would like to know if there's a program or procedure by which I could restore the old MFT in-place and have all the data that used to be in there accessible once again. Any help or light you could shed on how to proceed or what programs to use is really appreciated.
I've had testdisk to recover a partition that I somehow (careless) set to "RAW" while in Disk Management within Windows 7. Booted with GParted and accessed "TestDisk" through command prompt and it retreived the entire partion with no files lost. Only one out of 3 or 4 that worked. I believe "Active BootDisk > Partition Recovery" would work to, but haven't actually used it for that purpose