Free HDD Recovery Software.

[Guest]

I have a staff PC (from home) which had some software issues, so a friend sorted by formating the HDD and installing windows. Problem was he didn't tell the member of staff, so they didn't backup. So have lost all photos, etc etc.

 

I have tried Winternals File recovery, but doesn't detect anything. Anyone here have any suggestions?

 

Cheers

[Geoff]

train your staff to keep backups.

 

More over I find using XP's 'Offline Files' feature for My Documents and redirecting it to a server share works well for staff laptops. Just keep ontop of the Cache folder size. Also you might want to consider Shadow copy too.

[Guest]

As I did say above, it is their home PC, so nothing to do with the school LAN

[Simcfc73]

If they've reformatted the Hard drive then they won't get anything back. I've used loads of different recovery programs and most of them won't do you any good due to it being formatted.

Tell your staff to create a seperate partition to store their data on or get a old Iomega drive.

[Geoff]

You'd have to send it to a specialist data recovery firm. This typically costs between a few hundred and a few thousand pounds. I doubt the data is worth it?

[Guest]

Well just ran DiskInternals FAT Recovery 1.2, which has done a good job of detecting alot of files on the formated drive. But the evaluation copy wont let you restore files.

 

Oh well, will give them the option of purchasing the software, then its up top them.

[russdev]

can i suggest something to people might sound obvious but make a bit image of it (i.e not using norton ghost but some software that makes exact copy thn restore copy on to spair hard drive.

 

Then if you need to senmd orgianl nothing you have done would have mucked it up

 

good resource for info on file recorvery is the in the trenches podcast (http://kevindevin.com) one hosts does lot fo this just go through the old shows and show notes plenty to keep you informed..

 

cheers

 

russ

[russdev]

also have look here on there wiki

 

http://itt.theintegrity.net/pmwiki.php?n=ITT.RecoverFilesAfterSystemRebuild

[MkII]

PC Inspector File Recovery is a good free tool:

 

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

[sahmeepee]

PC Inspector File Recovery is a good free tool:

 

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

 

We always use that one. Free, fairly effective, but does crash occasionally. Generally it doesn't matter to us much if it doesn't work because we're recovering stuff as a favour.