Accidentally formatted my VeraCrypt drive

[Andrew Baker]

I accidentally did a quick format on my encrypted drive using windows disk management.
The drive was 2 TB fully encrypted non system and it was not partitioned, also I don't have backup headers.

Is there any way I can recover my data?

[Anilii]

Hi, maybe it is a aliitle bit late to answer your question, but I think if you don't have a backup. The best way is to use a data recovery tool, there are many choices on the net. You can try the Bitwar Data Recovery tool, I have used before. Hope it can help you anyway.

[duntuk]

I did a similar thing... What fixed it for me was to use Paragaon Hard Disk Manager 12.

Somehow, maybe during Windows 10 USB setup, an extra 128MB partition was added to my external hard drive.

NOTE:When I setup a new drive (external or internal) I delete ALL partitions and create a SINGLE one; I encrypt the entire (single) partition. REASON: external drives come with extra partitions that store manufacturer partitions, probably used to restore drives using a backdoor of sort. Windows won't show these, but Paragon will.

This is what I did using Paragon Hard Disk Manager.

1. Delete ALL partitions on the drive. Then hit apply (green checkmark at top)
2. Select the same drive and create a new partition, DO NOT format it, and select NO drive letter. Then hit apply.
3. Try remouting the new partition in Veracrypt.

[Andrew Baker]

After doing a little digging I managed to recover all of my data, here are the steps I took:

1. used veracrypt to restore volume headers (i didn't initially know about this feature)
2. entered the password to mount the drive
3. used R-Studio to scan the drive
4. copied everything to another drive

Thanks for completely ignoring my post guys.

[Travis]

This is another example of a program which raises the question "Why pay when there are good freeware alternatives available?" https://www.pandorarecovery.com/recover-deleted-files.html The "deep scan" feature on this program is as good as many of the programs for which you will have to pay to recover files. It also seems to be faster than some of the ones that I have tried out.
Hopefully there will never be a need to use this program because of accidentally deleted files, but it does also show the need to use erasing rather than deleting to ensure that files are unrecoverable.

[John Williams]

Hi I have a very similar issue. I accidentally Quick Formatted the Veracrypt drive. I cannot recover the files through Recuva because access is denied. I also cannot mount the drive. What can I possibly do? I tried the Recover Header Option and that does not work. I get the same error message. Please help.