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Help!!! Lost my data due to uninstall

D

Drakula

Senior member
This past Friday, when I was uninstalling a program, it did not just uninstall itself, it wiped out more than half of my files. I am not sure how come that happened, but it did.🙁 Now I need some recommendation on recovering my important files, I would say all that were lost are important, but some files are way more important than others, i.e. school works. Please help, any suggestions would be great!!
 
Ouch. Do you have another computer available that you could use for the recovery attempt? The only recovery software I've tried myself was just for experimentation, PC Inspector, which is freeware. They urge you to not have the drive in use while trying to recover stuff from it, lest you overwrite something you want, so if you have another PC... yeah.

Also do a search of the Technical Support forum for "recovery." Others have posted their recommendations before.
 
Originally posted by: mechBgon
Ouch. Do you have another computer available that you could use for the recovery attempt? The only recovery software I've tried myself was just for experimentation, PC Inspector, which is freeware. They urge you to not have the drive in use while trying to recover stuff from it, lest you overwrite something you want, so if you have another PC... yeah.

Also do a search of the Technical Support forum for "recovery." Others have posted their recommendations before.
Click to expand...

Yea, I do have another PC that I can use to try to recover the data, however, I forgot to mention, that the computer with loss data is a laptop. 😱:frown: And I cannot really open it and use some enclosure, because I am under one of those service plan from Best Buy, even though my laptop warranty expired. Another sad thing is that my laptop is not really accessible by Ethernet due to some settings. 🙁 I do have, firewire, which I also have an external drive, do you know if I could use PC Inspector and recover the data to the firewire drive? I will also do some search in the forum later. Thanks for that suggestion. :thumbsup:
 
You could run PC Inspector on the same system that the data was lost from, it will do it... it just increases the chance of overwriting something you wanted to save. Also, be aware that it isn't a very intuitive program to use.
 
Sorry to bring this thread back from the brink of death, but does anyone know the effects of making a ghost image of the drive and recover from the image? By that, I mean if I were to use some disk imaging software, say Norton Ghost or something similar, would it be ok to recover files from the image? I never done it before, so I am not sure if that will work. I am asking because I need to send the computer for fixing and would really like to wipe it clean before I do that due to sensitive informations on the drive before, that and because I do not have another drive, otherwise I would just use another drive. Please let me know. Any information would help. Thanks.

P.S. Does anyone have good guides to making disk image using Norton Ghost? I seen couple of them before, but forgot the links. Thanks. 😱
 
Don't know about ghostie, but,
try Getdataback, or Spinrite6, and they will write to any drive you want them to.
 
Yeah, I suppose I can just recover without making an disk image.

Is disk imaging 1:1 in size? Or it does some compression? 😕
 
There is usually compression involved in disk imaging, but some, like ACRONIS true image give you some choice in the matter.

Bear in mind, that a perfect disk imager will give you the exact same problem. You really do want to try and recover the data rather than image the hdd.
 
Ok. I guess my basic question is just that will I be able to recover my data using the image of the disk, rather than the physical one? Because with disk image, I can spend as much time as I needed to recover, whereas I need to put the physical drive back into the laptop so I can get the problems, not data lost related, fixed.
 
My understanding is that Ghost (and likely similar programs) only 'image' the active files and not areas of the drive that are marked unused (or deleted). Otherwise the size of the image would be directly proportional to the size of the disc and, in practice, they're not.

So, I would say that you would not be able to recover deleted data from an 'image' created by Ghost or other cloning tools unless they specifically offer a bit-for-bit capability.



 
Acronis or Bootit [i think,] give you the option for 'cloning a drive'. Which, I would take to mean that they 'clone the drive'. Don't know though for sure if that is what they mean.

True Image from Acronis is very easy to use - haven't had to restore any backups yet, so i can't tell you how reliable it is ;~}
 
acronis and ghost, and almost all cloning tools merely transfer/save the clusters that is marked as in use by default. The old ghost had a "raw" mode that copies everything, but you have to put it in a drive that was very similar to the source. I don't know about the new ghost, since it is actually another utility that symantec bought and replaced ghost with.
 
Thanks for the replies guys, I have never did a disk imaging before, so I was not sure how it should work. Guess I will stick with recoverying from my hard drive at the moment. 🙂

I do have the old Ghost, DOS version, came with one of the motherboard when it was bought few years ago, maybe I could give it a try.
 
Ghost 2003 will do it, you need to make a disk image using the "raw" or "forensic" options, not the default (which will only image sectors with actual files in them). The resulting image file will be of equivalent size, so be aware of that.

Another option, if the disk to be imaged doesn't have any defective sectors, would be the use of a bootable Linux CD, and then use the 'dd' command, which can do a raw block-level duplication between two disks. I'm not a *nix-head, perhaps someone else could help you with the specifics on how to do that.
 
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