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Data Recovery Help

I

IdahoB

Senior member
A problem with a new soundcard caused me to reformat my system. Normally I keep everything safely on another drive to the system partition but I'd foolishly left some data on my desktop.

I have since reformatted (only a quick format) the partition and re-installed WinXP.

Here are my thoughts:

Since it is a new format, WinXP will occupy the same place on the drive as before - so it shouldn't have overwritten the data. As most of the drive is considered empty by the new install, all the 0s and 1s of my original data is still there, and should be recoverable with the right software.

The file format is .wav - fairly consistent structure and easily recogniseable.

I've saved the entire partition into an image so I can work on the new install without damaging the data.

Does anyone have any suggestions? These music files are very important to me and utterly irreplaceable.
 
The only thing you can do is send your hard drive image to one of those data recovery companies. They might be able to find your sound files. It won't be cheap, however.

Here is a data recovery company I worked with once for a client who had to have some data off of a hard drive that developed a hardware problem. DriveSavers
 
Hmm - surely it can be done without going that far? Anyhow, I'm in the UK so I'd prefer a UK company if it came to that.
 
It sounds like you need to contact a data recovery company.

One of my friends lost a drive and tried Ontrack (www.ontrack.co.uk). I think they quoted him about £3000 for his database files, prompting him to just go withouth.
 
I'm fairly certain you are screwed. You are trying to recover data from an image? The imaging software (Ghost/Drive Image ?) I'm pretty positive just copies the file system and the data written to it. If the file system doesn't include the data, it won't copy it. You NEED to do the recovery from the ORIGINAL drive the data was on. If you have already started writing to the original drive, you have a VERY good chance you have already written over the data you wanted to recover. Sorry dude, but I highly doubt even a data recovery company will be able to retrieve your data if it has already been written over.

Lesson, make an image of your drive, drop it on DVD, and THEN reformat your hard drive.

You can start the crying.....now.
 
what did you use to create the image? I agree with JackBurton, you're screwed. I don't believe images copy "blank" areas of the HD, otherwise the files would always be as large as the full HD capacity.
 
You are really SOL. You can send the drive off to a company to get the data recovered. They probably won't get it all, and it will cost you an arm leg and maybe a kidney depending on the size of the drive.


Lesson Learned? BIG BIG external Hard drives to keep your data safe.

chucu
 
The image was made by disk recovery software specifically to preserve the entire original drive - the image is the full size of the original disk and includes a copy of every byte originally there.

Hmm - so far the advice has been honest if not very cheering. I still believe this is possible without hiring a data recovery firm - the disk wasn't even fragmented so the files should not only exist but be intact as single entities.

I'll keep trying I guess - thanks for the advice so far.
 
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