To help you prevent mistakes, the HD24 recorder will require you to confirm up to three times that you really wish to quickformat a drive. Yet, accidentally quickformatting a drive is more common than you would expect. One of the reasons is that it is not always entirely clear which drive is being formatted.
Fortunately, when the HD24 recorder quick-formats a drive, all it does is reset the project lists and drive usage information. The audio itself is still there; and in fact, all song information still exists on disk as well. This includes the allocation information which specifies where the audio resides on disk.
Making sure that the HD24 recorder only contains one drive when quickformatting could help. Other than that, by asking for confirmation three times the HD24 recorder already does pretty much everything possible to prevent this situation.
Use the general recovery procedure with the unquickformat header file, rather than the longliverec header file. This will attempt to create a single virtual project with all songs in it. As any project is limited to 99 songs, the total number of songs that can currently be recovered with this method is 99.
* Although Quickformatting a drive using HD24tools is mostly similar to the process on the HD24 recorder, it is somewhat more thorough. HD24tools will reset both project- and song information, so for recovery you will need to use the longliverec header instead.