Computers: Hard drive recovery question

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Originally Posted by ioan

My humble advice:
Preventive action is always easier to implement than recovery!
Try making regular backups of your computers hard drive and you then you can sleep in peace.

Otherwise as long as your hard drive was not encrypted you should have first copied the relevant data from it using a docking station and then format it.
:)

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Or simply asking people what to do before going and formatting your HDD. I would have recommended using a boot disc to kill the administrator password on the machine.

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Originally Posted by Daniel

Or simply asking people what to do before going and formatting your HDD. I would have recommended using a boot disc to kill the administrator password on the machine.

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Right!

Do you have a spare HDD Valve?
Laptop or desktop?

Drop me a PM if you like, I might be able to help you out.

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Originally Posted by Roamy

Dude if you reformatted the drive that the files are on you need to go take a course in forensics. they may still be on the drive until you overwrite them with something else. Your mistake was reformatting the drive before you recovered your files.

You can try and plug it into a mac and it will see any files that are readable.

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Nah. No need to do that. It's very hard to erase anything off a hard drive. Most things should be recoverable, however some things will end up corrupted.

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Originally Posted by Ghostwalker

valve you could always try any of these software:
a freeware:
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/fil...scription.html

payware:
http://www.recovermyfiles.com/
http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywi...-partition.htm

i have not tried any of them myself so i cant tell you if it will work or not.

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I can vouch for Easeus, it works well. You need a slave HDD for it to work properly though. And their English is horrendous. :p

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Daniel

Or simply asking people what to do before going and formatting your HDD. I would have recommended using a boot disc to kill the administrator password on the machine.

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Daniel - I tried doing that for several hours. Unfortunately, without access to my admin A/C, I could not disable my McAfee, and none of the above programs worked. Believe me, I tried.

Since the PC was new, and everything was newly installed, I had very few files on it that was not expendable, so I finally thought:"Buger-it", and just reformatted the hard drive.

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Originally Posted by Koz

Do you have a spare HDD Valve?
Laptop or desktop?

Drop me a PM if you like, I might be able to help you out.



Nah. No need to do that. It's very hard to erase anything off a hard drive. Most things should be recoverable, however some things will end up corrupted.

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Yes Koz! I do have a spare hard drive, and also a spare laptop. As I mentioned above, I just want to learn something and see if I can recover some files on my re-formatted hard drive. Success would be one helluva achievement.

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Originally Posted by Valve Bounce

Daniel - I tried doing that for several hours. Unfortunately, without access to my admin A/C, I could not disable my McAfee, and none of the above programs worked. Believe me, I tried.

Since the PC was new, and everything was newly installed, I had very few files on it that was not expendable, so I finally thought:"Buger-it", and just reformatted the hard drive.

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You obviously weren't doing it right, you don't boot into windows so you don't need to deal with any AV, you boot with the boot disc. Just a couple of months ago I had to kill an admin account on a PC at work and it worked just fine.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Daniel

You obviously weren't doing it right, you don't boot into windows so you don't need to deal with any AV, you boot with the boot disc. Just a couple of months ago I had to kill an admin account on a PC at work and it worked just fine.

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I haDN'T MADE A BOOT DISC YET AT THE TIME - NOW i HAVE. :(

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Valve Bounce

so I finally thought:"Buger-it", and just reformatted the hard drive.

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Sometimes this is the easiest way!

Try Piriform Ricuva freeware. I have not needed it yet, but it "sees" files dating back to 2005 (though admitedly unrecoverable)