data recovery from 'unknow' drive

[gwendes]

Hi everyone,

A student teacher has asked me to recover what I can from her laptop. After a day of running various utils on it I noticed that the drive wsa a lot smaller than actually printed on the drive. Disk Management recognises TWO drives so I'm guessing her data is on the other.

 

The drive does not have a letter assigned and show with FAT32 Healthy (Unknown Partition) . Anyone know a simple way to allocate a drive letter. Right - click only gives the option to delete the partition...

 

Thanks!

[Abaddon]

I use O&O Disk recovery tools for this sort of thing - can recover deleted partitions, formatted drives, or damaged drives that show nothing at all... been fairly successful, and cost less than £100 for educational license.

[gwendes]

I jsut ran gparted linux and was able to remove a 'hidden' flag o the drive. Not holding out too much hope that her data is there anymore - think it's a Packard Bell restore image

[mattx]

You got a copy of ghost ?

If so - run GDISK - there is a switch on there to hide and unhide partitions.

/HIDE /-HIDE

 

Its all command line driven so you may need to boot to a command line.

If you have not got Gdisk - drop me a note, I'll send it to you...

[gwendes]

It was just some restore files from the manufacturer. Has anyone got any suggestions for some free recovery software? I ran PC Inspector File Recovery on the suggestion from a colleague but don't know how to restore the recovered clusters into files.

 

The drive is reported as healthy - I think something from Limewire has messed with her assignments

 

The other strange thing that I noticed - she knows nothing about it - it a network drive called Hotmail on 'NetDrive' X:

[mattx]

Best results for lost data I have had I was using:

 

http://www.recovermyfiles.com/

 

Thing is you have to pay for it. Or do something very naughty to use it....

 

For free stuff, check out:

 

http://free-backup.info/data-recovery-software.htm

[gwendes]

I used PC Inspector and have 'recovered' over 4Gb of lost files. They are all in clusters of 1472Kb - Does anyone know how to restore the actual files from these?

[Ben_Stanton]

I've used stella phoenix on many occasions with very great success. I think yu can download a trial from the site...

 

I have heard of some sites that provide cracks (whatever they are)...

 

I of course have a fully legitimate copy and would not recommend anything other than that...