formated my documents

[jst0ney]

I need help restoring some data that I formatted over.
OK before I get started and you flame and rip on me. I have reinstalled windows 25+ times without a hitch. I have a list of everything I need to save and I regularly backup. But for some reason I haven't ever backed up the my documents folder. I don't really know why I haven't I guess it never seemed a critical folder (unlike my UT2003 save file).

Here's what I did:
I have a 80 GB maxtor drive partitioned like follows: C:20gb, E:30gb, F:30gb. The C drive is my winxp drive which has the my documents folder (which contains about three years of digital photos, I guess it is critical). I decided that I needed a fresh windows install so I copied the usually list of stuff over to the E drive. I had planned on burning a DVD of the my documents folder then changed my mind and decided to copy it over to E as well. Well I got distracted and I guess I thought I had done it.

I inserted the winxp pro disk, rebooted and used the winxp utility to format (not the quick way) and partition C in NTFS.

I reinstalled windowsxp pro.

Installed officexp pro

Installed norton systemworks

Installed nero

Then went about looking for the my documents copy to transfer over. Needless to say it wasn't there.

I immediately turned of the computer, because I wanted to prevent any further writing to the disk.

My first thought was to sent the drive into a professional data recovery service like Drive Savers. Well they charge from $900-2700. The bitch about it is that they won't know the price until they are done. This is way more than I can spend.

Does anybody know of a cheaper service? A way to do it myself? Am I buggered? Please help?

I will be happy to provide more details if needed.

 

[Jeff7]

Try R-studio. Maybe it'll do the job. Use the demo first, and see what it can find - try recovering a file that is under 64KB (limitation of the demo) and see if it's usable.

 

[thorin]

Whatever you do DO NOT copy/move/duplicate etc anything on the partition your are trying to restore from.

Try Norton Undelete (er whatever it's called by Symantec) i'm sure you can "acquire" it. Failing that try one of these

Thorin

 

[Kyteland]

If you formatted and installed all of that stuff on the drive then chances are pretty good that those files are unrecoverable. If you had not installed anything you could hahve gotten them back. Give Norton Undelete a try, but those files are probably gone.

 

[jst0ney]

Just an update. I used R-Studio to scan my HD. It pulled up everything that I had on that drive. Three Old windows and two Linux partitions. I was able to recover 95% of the files that I had deleted and formatted over. I cannot recommend this software enough. R-studio is great. It's the best $50 that I have ever spent.

 

[thorin]

Originally posted by: jst0ney
Just an update. I used R-Studio to scan my HD. It pulled up everything that I had on that drive. Three Old windows and two Linux partitions. I was able to recover 95% of the files that I had deleted and formatted over. I cannot recommend this software enough. R-studio is great. It's the best $50 that I have ever spent.

Glad to hear you got things worked out! BTW What did you decide to do for future backups? Tape? CDR? Etc......

Thorin

 

[jst0ney]

Originally posted by: thorin

Originally posted by: jst0ney
Just an update. I used R-Studio to scan my HD. It pulled up everything that I had on that drive. Three Old windows and two Linux partitions. I was able to recover 95% of the files that I had deleted and formatted over. I cannot recommend this software enough. R-studio is great. It's the best $50 that I have ever spent.

Glad to hear you got things worked out! BTW What did you decide to do for future backups? Tape? CDR? Etc......

Thorin

I actually have everything backedup on my ipod. I am buying a dvd burner soon that will also help in this process. Thanks again.

BTW, me and a friend were playing around with r-studio after my rig got back on track. He actually did a network scan of his xbox HD. Will I dunno what happend but that drive dosen't work anymore. I swear we are not dumbasses but I guess thats what you get when you play around with software you don't understand. Anybody have any thoughts as to what could have happened.?