HELP!! DATA Recovery after WDS Re-image

[atechguy]

Yes you guessed it. I am desperate

 

Has anyone ever successfully recovered data after re-imaging a workstation from Windows 7 to 10. I'm not data recovery expert but i'm looking for some advice or guidance here on how to at least attempt to get it back.

[mw184]

Have you tried using any data recovery tools? I would advise not booting from the drive and hooking it up as an extra drive to a PC or laptop you have and then running some software to try and recover the data. I haven't tried them on a drive, but have had success recovering data off of formatted SD cards and USB drives in the past. The pieces of software I have tried are Recuva and EaseUS Data Recovery.

 

Otherwise the only other option I could think of would be to contact data recovery specialists and see if they can help.

 

Hope you manage to get the data back!

[jinnantonnixx]

^^^ What he said.

 

Re-iterating how important it is not to start the machine up. If you boot it up, it will start writing to disk, potentially overwriting your data.

Take the disk out and hook it up via a SATA/USB recovery kit/dock.

Alternatively make a recovery boot CD/USB and boot with this image to load the tools you need.

 

Some options for a live CD/bootable ISO are listed here.

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Livecd

 

 

Recuva is worth a shot and is one of the easiest tools to use.

 

When things have gone badly wrong, I've used Testdisk and Photorec to recover photos from a disk (an EXT4 partition which was reformatted to NTFS) with success.

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download

 

Testdisk can attempt to recover files if the file and directory structure is still available, otherwise Photorec can do a raw scrape of the disk looking for identifiable file-types. Be sure to omit the file-types you're not interested in, or you'll have a lot of sifting.

Edited January 7, 2020 by jinnantonnixx

[jthompson]

Never tried any such tools on a drive that's just been imaged by WDS, but a tool to add to your list of things to try would be PhotoRec (originally designed to recover photos from memory cards, hence the name, but it can be used to recover any type of file). It's not the friendliest but I've found it effective many time in the past.

 

I don't know to what extent the imaging process will impact on your chances here, though.

[atechguy]

Thanks you, this has really helped. I can try these tomorrow