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Hi. A friend of mine initialized by mistake his WD USB 1,5 Tb hard drive, trying to format a new hd. He asked me if it's possible to recover his data (mostly videos and photos), and gave me the disk. I tried to locate the deleted partition, but all I could see after a Quick Search was the new empty HFS created by Disk Utility. Now I'm running Deeper Search: I guess it will took the whole night, maybe more. I read the manual, but I'm a bit confused about what to do next. In the past I successfully used TestDisk to recover data from two ExFAT disks, but this is a completely different task - and it seems much harder. Do you think it would be safer to save data with PhotoRec BEFORE trying to recover the partition?
Thanks in advance for your advices.

Do you know what the filesystem type was before he reformats the partition ?
If it was an HFS+ and it has been reformated as HFS+, testdisk will failed to locate the partition. You will have to use photorec to recover the data. As it has been reformated, you may have to enabe the expert mode in Options, start the recovery and force the sector size to 512 bytes, the default options can be use otherwise.

Thanks a lot. Your info will save me a lot of time: Deeper Search explored less than 10% since I wrote my first post on Friday night
Unfortunately yes, it was an HFS+ partition. He unadvertently selected the wrong device and formatted it... Definitely a bad move.
I'll follow your advice and use PhotoRec instead. Merci beaucoup.

Hi. I recovered about 700 Gb with PhotoRec. After that, the program asked me: "Create an image_remaining.dd (810525 MB) file with the unknown data (Answer N if not sure) (Y/N)". Since the disk was 1,5 Tb in size and it was almost full, I answered Yes. But now I need to know how to mount this partition in order to explore it... I'm using a Mac Pro with dual boot, OS X and Windows 7.
Many thanks in advance.

It's not possible to mount this dd file and as it contains the area where photorec hasn't recognize data, it's useless for 99% of the users.