Clicked Format by mistake

[pgentry 0]

Our DVR's free space was down to 15% and we thought we could erase old footage to clear up some space, hit Format on the HDD page. By the time we said Oops and unplugged the dvr, it had already deleted everything and now it doesn't record.

 

It's a H.264 Model KE-7116SX

 

How do I get it to record again?

 

Thanks

[survtech 0]

Can you click "format" again? If you unplugged the DVR before formatting was completed, most likely you just have to complete the process before the HDD becomes useable again.

[emptech 0]

Stop! Don't go any further. You need to run some recovery software on the hard drive. There might even be some disk utilities that will "unformat" the drive. I use a product called R-tools, there are many more. Most of the time I would connect the hard drive to a windoze system and run the recovery software. What you don't want to do is write to the drive, as that may corrupt any valid data. Some of the disk formats may be unreadable in a windoze system. I've had other times I had to put a drive in a unix or linux system and do the recovery.

 

It would be a good idea to have a second drive, same size that you can lay the data back to, including any boot sectors, etc.

 

I'm not giving you any specifics but hopefully putting you in the right direction.

 

Jim

[survtech 0]

Dude,

 

It's a DVR. Unless there's something recorded that's super-critical, why bother with data retrieval? If it's just video data, there is no "there" there.

[27901591 0]

Go to your HDD setup and see if the dvr is recognizing the hard drive, see the pic below, you can see under device there is a name and under capacity says 500gb, you need to have something similar to this, if there is nothing there then turn the dvr off(dont just unplug it) power it down first, open the dvr up, unplug the hard drive and plug it back in again, go to the hdd setup again and see if it appears.

[emptech 0]

Look at the first complaint, he hit format by mistake.

 

That probably wiped out the file control block or whatever the o/s uses to keep track of the data. The data is likely still there, I assume that's important to him otherwise he wouldn't be asking. If it wasn't important, continue with the formatting and prepare the drive for use. From my experience the o/s is probably some flavor of Linux and using a file structure that windoze doesn't recognize, but file recovery programs can usually recognize other file systems. If they don't, plug the drive into a Linux system and use some Linux-base file recovery.

 

To minimize data loss, make sure to not to write back to the same drive, best to write the data to another drive for now. Once the filesystem has been re-created, it can be put back onto the original drive. If you have to pay somebody for data recovery, it can be very expensive, but with patience you may be able to do it yourself.

 

Jim