Need particular hard drive software

Here's the back story: a client brought me a laptop w/ a cracked LCD, and did not want it fixed, he simply wanted the hard drive installed in to an external enclosure. A co-worker installed the drive in to a SATA/USB enclosure but did NOT plug it in to see if any data was visible (yeah, bad move). So at no cost, we returned the damaged laptop and gave the client the the enclosure. He returned 3-4 days later saying there was no data on the drive. I plugged it in, and there was data on it; he said "that's stuff I just put on there". There is no OS on the drive. I ran a data recovery tool overnight and it only found about 125 Excel files and mixed PDFs. The client says there was 6000+ pictures on there.

Anyway- I think he formatted the drive. I have done some Googling about how to locate a format date but have only found some things that are fairly involved- I can follow the steps, but was hoping there was some quick & easy freeware or cheap paidware that will reveal the last time the drive was formatted.

Thanks!

 

When the CMD chkdsk is run on a drive, doesn't it report a file system type, volume name , and the date and time created?

 

No, chkdsk does not reveal the format date unfortunately....

 

A volume serial number is a hex number that is supposed to be based on the date and time the volume was formatted. The problem is, I have found very little information on how the number is calculated for FAT32 or NTFS. There's a utility named "DCode" that's made by Digital Detective that converts hex to date/time but it didn't correctly convert the volume serial numbers I tested. If you want to look at it, the DCode application is available at the bottom of the page on the Digital Detective "Downloads" page...

http://www.digital-detective.co.uk/downloads.asp
http://www.digital-detective.co.uk/documents/Volume Serial Numbers.pdf

I know this isn't an exact answer to your question but I'm hoping that it might be a lead in the right direction. Sorry if it isn't much help.