Posted on 07/19/2010 11:51:12 PM PDT by Ancient Drive
I have a client PC that someone accidentally wiped and he installed a fresh copy of the OS(WinXP) thinking it was reverting to an earlier state. He lost all Documents. Funny he shows up kind of embarrassed and tells me about it. Do you guys have recommendations on what program works best? Thanks guys!
Back up, I recommend Norton Ghost.
Security, I recommend Online Armor++, but it's a pay to play for the full versinon.
It goes without saying,
Place the drive in an external enclosure. I have used ‘recovermyfiles’ software before to recover pictures from a reformatted computer (thankfully they chose the quick format option), but I've never seen it actually recover files from a system that was formatted in a more systematic manner.
As far as I understand it the only difference between quick format and full format is that full format performs error checking. Nothing else, or minimal else is written to the drive. Pls correct if you know otherwise
It's almost all gone now. The installation of Windows will have overwritten some large number of files (some of the old Windows and some of various other files). There may still be files left (formatting, depending on how he did it, only zeros out the FAT/NTFS table and doesn't overwrite the original file), but he'd better hope he had a defragmented hard drive, or the pieces of the files left won't be able to be strung back together.
If interested, I can go look up options, but this is not likely to bring back much at all. It will require software that reads the sectors and rebuilds what files it can.
You say he wiped it? How many times?
3 or more? Forget it, to much effort and you may have to send the drive out to professional that uses a combination of equipment and software. Very Expensive.
Just a reinstall? Try Disk Recovery, I had to use it once on a drive I spun and worked great.
Helped another friend who deleted files and got almost everything he was looking for back.
The important thing is to take the drive out ASAP and stop writing to it, which you do every time you turn on the computer.
Drop it into an enclosure and hook up to your PC. You may even still many of the files he needs without resorting to fancy software.
If you don’t see the files and can’t do a simple search on the drive then go to Fry’s and ask their “fake” experts about recovery options.
They sell complete kits with enclosure, cable, software, etc.
Gonna cost a couple hundred bucks no mater what though and that is the minimum.
If he absolutely has to have the files, take a small loan and you can get them, provided he didn’t de-mil. LOL, he probably didn’t and was just installing over his previous OS, so the files should be there using the option above.
he wiped it once through the xp setup.
Great! Then this should be simple.
Try pulling the drive and putting into an enclosure, hook up to your PC(hope you have something like F-prot for protection) and see what you find.
If not, use Disk Recovery. I think it’s $99 bucks but it does work and you can mark the files you want by extension such as xls, doc, jpg, etc.
When I used it 4 years ago, I just grabbed everything and handed it back to a friend on his drive with a back up to an extra drive I had laying around.
He paid for everything and bought me an excellent bottle of cognac, Kelt, for my work.
Told him to back up once a week, at least and you should be fine or you can buy a product by “cute” that does it automatically and is way better than Microsuck.
These days I keep my back ups to a couple of SD’s as they hold all my work just fine. This way I can always whip one out if my laptop takes a dump and put them in another computer and keep on trucking.
The other thing I have done that really makes all this foolproof, mostly, is have everything loaded on Microsoft Virtual PC. It is just an image and I keep two copies of my work, in this way.
With VPC the OS and all the files are just one image instead of a million little files. If I can get to another PC and install VPC, Boom! I am totally an completely back in business with all my software, personal settings and work files.
What I’ve done is keep a copy of the install for VPC on a flash and I backup the VPC drive I typically work with.
Spun hard drive? Argh! But, get another PC and I am back up in less than 1 hour with everything. I am carrying around my hard drive.
I have this on two seperate Flash that are stored in seperate places.
EMC also makes an excellent product that does the same thing only better, of course and is not such a memory hog. I believe it costs around $120 and one day I am going to convert to that.
Thanks for the tip! I do the odd bit of data recovery, usually from a flipped out windoze box with a knoppix disc. That alone blows some minds just seeing that.
Good advice to remove the drive. The data is probably still there, at least until it gets overwritten. The trick is being able to read it. Some of the applications already posted will work under the right circumstances.
The quick formats don’t overwrite the data so it will be there until overwritten. If they did a full format then a forensics lab is about your only option.
Look in Documents and Settings for user accounts. Each user account you see will have Documents intact.
I don't think you'll find these old user accounts, if they exist, other than by looking in Documents and Settings.
Agree!
BACK UP DATA that is important to you. I back up my data to a D:\ partition AND to at least one USB exernal drive.
[I learned the hard way, when I has a system crash a few years ago and lost years of personal data.]
External (USB) drives are cheap. BUY one and USE it. Flash drives are from about 256mb to 64gb. A 4gb flash drive costs about $8.00.
Never put important data exclusively on your start-up/OS drive (usually Drive: C:\). Create a partition and put data contents there. AND back it up to DVD-RW AND/or external USB drive.
Use a drive imager program occasionally. That will save having to re-install from scratch and re-set an OS drive.
[I have an OS partition of about 30 gb and I occasionally use CloneGenius to create an image file. That has saved me many hours of reinstall time when I have had to restore the image files.]
Get in the habit of backing up important data. Get a back up program and use it. Otherwise, one day you will lose it. One day your drive will fail or your computer will quit.
Can’t help you recover. However, recently I used a product called DRIVE SCRUBBER. It actually works! My friend’s old PC had given up the ghost. Nothing to lose. Boat anchor time. I got this disc for $20 @ Best B. It advertises “approved by Dept. of Defense.”
I ran it twice. Took 2.3 hours first time. 1.5 second sweep.
Then re-loaded WIN Home Xp and all updates. Firefox, etc. now it rocks, and only 512MB memory.
No idea how I would recover old data from this hard drive. Product says it wipes clean all banking info, passwords, programs,etc. And to use it before donating PC to church, school, shelters, etc.
Anyway, GOOD LUCK!
thanks a lot! I used the portable one. It recovered everything! wow and it’s free!
So Recuva worked for you?
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