Mistakenly formatted an external drive

Hello folks,
Like an idiot, I formatted the wrong external drive, containing a lot of movies I had collected over the years. I ran Recuva App, and it found a lot of those files. The bad part is they won't play, either because of corruption or codecs I expect. The extensions are numerous, AVI MP4, VOB, and MOV to name a few. Is it possible to get them to play? I will attach several examples. They may be too damaged to fix. I did run Wondershare Repairit, but had no luck with it. Thanks for any advice I can get.
PS. Sadly, the files in question do not show up when I went to attach them here, so I took a screenshot. This won't be much help, but it does show in properties that something is still there. I tried to run the movies with VLC Player also, but they did not play.

There are professional recovery services where you may be able to submit questions:

@Dave L

The maximum size you can attach (pic or file), is 2MB
I gave you ten cookies... just for filling out your computer specs.




Here's some other things that may help... (with Win 11 and these forums)

Try other recovery software like WinfrGUI which is free.

The problem with any recovery tool is that they need to recover to a separate drive to avoid overwriting data on rhe drive that you are trying to recover the data from.

If you tried to recover to the same drive, then it almost certainly has corrupted the files, and hopes of recovery are very low.

Your probable only option is to engage very expensive services of recoovery specialists, and I seriously doubt that is worth it as probability of success is low anyway.

In the end, most movies can be redownloaded from the internet these days and archiving is just a conveniece - realistically how often did you play them?

As as aside, if you consider the movie archive to be important, then you need to consider having a backup of the archive as your archive drive could fail at any time (or you make a mistake as you did) anyway.

Depending on size of backups, maybe archiving to a cloud service may even be an option, at least movies not easily available on the web.

hi @Dave L

Welcome to Eleven Forums.

"I formatted the wrong external drive" hmmmm............. many people do this mistake. Before formatting any external disk, you must safely remove all other plugged in storage devices and ensure only the disk on which you operate remains. Prevention is better than cure.

Did you do a quick format or full format?

( A full format writes zeroes to all the sectors and hence all data will be lost upto the point it goes - some people realising the mistake stop the format - so data lost as far as it went)

A quick format only removes the partition tables in the disk. The data will remain intact. Running Partition Recovery Wizard in MiniTools Partition Wizard can in most cases recover the partitions and restore the disk. That if only you haven't written anything further to the disk after the accident..

Download, install and run Partition Recovery Wizard in MiniTools Partition Wizard v 9.1 and try your luck. ( On later versions Partition recovery is not free.) Download MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition 9.1 for windows - Filepuma.com

Sample screenshot:

Launch Partition Wizard. On the left Pane click on Partition Recovery Wizard > Next > Select your faulty Drive > Next > Full Disk > Next > QuickScan > Next. Allow the quick scan to complete. At the end of the quickscan you will get a window showing all the found partitions Post a screenshot of it ( only that Window. No need of any background). After you have taken the screenshot click on Cancel button on that Window and close PW. You can run it again if need be.

Just for our information
1. Please furnish full details of the external disk --- Manufacturer, Model. Capacity

2. GPT or MBR?

3. How many partitions, if you had multiple partitions on that disk.