Hard drive / PST file recovery

[googlemad]

A family friend has in their wisdom had their laptop down a computer shop to be reinstalled and they've done a terrible job of doing so - especially when I initially did the laptop I kindly left a Windows system image backup on a secondary partition! (Luckily they didn't wipe that!)

 

Anyway previous to it being wiped Outlook was installed and they're wondering if I can somehow recover Outlook (easy enough) and their email - harder as I need to somehow dig up the PST file! Any free software which I can try to recover it? I doubt very much the hard drive has been anything more than quick formatted...

[Steve21]

It will take a lil while if huge disk but CGSecurity - Data recovery: TestDisk & PhotoRec is the one I normally use

 

Steve

[howartp]

Ditto.

[rich_tech]

testdisk and photorec are the bees knees, if you cannot see a partition in windows get it on linux and see if it can be mounted, but if you want a quicker program to take a look - recuva by piriform is good as well if the drive is recognised in windows.

[free780]

Recuva might find it. Slave the drive though. Better still make an image with test disk. Then mount with OSF mount.

[googlemad]

Thanks, in the end I used Eeaus Free as it had a limit of recovering 1gb which was more than enough...

 

..However I could have not bothered at all as the PST was in the My Documents folder which was backed up by the computer shop! Oh well!

[timbo343]

Have a lool at puran file recovery too, we use this for USB sticks which are at the "your device needs to be formatted"