Data Recovery and Disk Utilities Forum @R-TT

By mistake I have formatted my external hard disk that had McAfee Encryption for removable media in place. There has been no action on this external hard disk subsequent to these steps. I tried some of the recovery tools, but none have helped. Is there any chance that I can recover my lost files?

I'm afraid no chances for recovery.

You should get a clone of the drive, decrypt the clone, then scan to recover the files.

What was the original file system and what did you format it as?

Have you done anything to it since or have you left it alone?

I'm afraid the drive was formatted over the McAfee Encryption information on the disk, and thus cannot be decrypted.

Hi Alt,

I am not that familiar with McAfee but i have had success with formatted encrypted drives using other encryption methods. Are you sure there is no backup metadata sectors that could be used to repopulate the overwritten ones and then force decryption?

I believe Mcafee Endpoint actually stores the DEK (disk encryption keys) on the management server, and they can be obtained from the admin account. I don't believe with Mcafee the disk encryption key is actually stored on the disk. That is, if we are talking about Mcafee Endpoint, and not some cheap OEM software they provided with an external drive (I think I've heard of this but not dealt with it).