I've just lost all my data, is there any hope?

[FierceRed]

Hello everyone. I'm a first time poster, long time visitor to Anandtech.com and I'm glad I finally got around to registering onto the forums. I only wish it could've been done under better circumstances.

Today is a sad day for me. I've recently had some electricity issues in my room where power became unreliable to the point that lights were dimming and my computer restarted (accompanied by a complaining spark from an electrical outlet on the opposite side of my room) within 10-30 seconds of my turning it on.

That being said, I disconnected my computer and moved it downstairs to a more suitable power supplying environment. Upon bootup and attempted access of my F: Drive however, I got a message somewhere along the lines of "F: Drive disk structure is corrupted and cannot be accessed." Scared out of my mind, I hastily ran "chkdsk F: /f /r /v" from a "cmd" Command Prompt, since my F: Drive had everything on it, literally over 120 gigabytes of MP3's, animation backups and College homework on it.

After chkdsk completed and made a bunch of reseted security attributes adjustments, added what looked like 20 gigabytes (the F: Drive is a 160 GB drive) to the Bad Clusters File and corrections to the MFT bitmap and volume files however, I was grief-stricken to find that my F: drive was now reporting it had 123 gigabytes free and was now completely empty. Over a half decade of collected music, video, pictures and personal work gone. This happened less then 15 minutes from my typing this post and I'm still holding back tears.

Now I've read a few articles about true file deletion, both in newspapers and in articles on the web. One of them is a recent addition to the guides section at TweakTown.com, the "Spyware and Adware Removal Guide ? Speed Up and Free your PC" Guide, from which I quote from Page 4:

".....which properly removes files from your system by using the US Department of Defense recommendations for secure file destruction. You might think when you delete a file from your PC it is gone but it isn?t really ? if someone wanted to find it bad enough, they could."

So I have to ask. Is all hope truly lost? Is there a way I can possibly recover the 120+ Gigabytes of data I'd accumulated throughout more then 6 years of my life that my computer told me I lost today?

My harddrive is a Western Digital 160GB w/ 8MB cache. Since running the "chkdsk F: /f /r /v," I've disconnected it from my computer and have refused to even look at it in fear of ruining any chance I might have at data recovery. I'm willing to try absolutely anything at all to get it back. Anyone and everyone, please respond with any idea you may have at all. I don't care how low a chance of recovery it has or how crazy it sounds. Truly, this is my S.O.S. for any help at all.

.....and the greatest part of this tragedy is, I bought this harddrive less then a month ago and transferred the 120+ gigs of data to it from 2 other seperate harddrives in the hopes of creating a secure backup to guard against exactly this kind of situation. If I weren't so sombered and sullen by my loss, I might be amused enough by the irony to crack a half-smile.

Please....any help at all....thank you.

 

[fisheye]

I'd try a data recovery program like GetDataBack at http://www.runtime.org/
The trial version lets you 'preview' files to see if they're recoverable before you have to buy the real version... I've had success with this program before when my hard drive got corrupt and attempting to access the data crashed the system...

chkdsk probably just cleared out the file table...as long as you don't write anything new to the drive and it's not physically damaged I think you have a good chance of recovering data.

 

[alm4rr]

Well if you still have the 2 old drives you actually have a physical backup so that should help

If you restored from those 2 drives what % of data would you be able to reclaim?

On a side note, I've been tbere too, but a virus popped up on my screen to tell me it was deleting my files and it pleasantly popped up a screen to show the file tree being reduced to nothing.... I was already running late to work and my supervisor said I walked in ghostly white... probably b/c it was the middle of midterms and all my papers were just deleted 😀

 

[earthman]

First of all, if you are going to have that much irreplaceable data on a hard drive, it should be backed up to at least one other location. Secondly, if you go to grc.com and purchase spinrite 6.0, you may be able to save it. It is the only program I can think of that might help you.

 

[willfreund]

I would suggest getting a diagnose from a pc repair shop.you can normal see if the data is there when you externaly load it. If its not there, Then your drive got owned and even software utilites may not remove it.But i would try that free trail first as long as you got the drive up and running.

 

[Odd Bob]

I had a similar problem and what I did was to spend a lot time searching for recovery programs. Many of them (the only ones I considered) have demo modes that allow you to do searches that will identify what files can be retrieved. So you load a bunch of demos, run them and then buy the one that looks like it will bring back the most files. I ended up with Recover My Files for $70 which beat everything else I tried by a wide margin. But you should know that it will only look for files with certain extensions. It tells you what those file types are, so it's not a crap shoot. But be forwarned that if you have some wierd file types that aren't included and notice that they say they might consider adding new ones...the operative word here is "might". In my case they weren't will to. Also, it listed several hundred .jpg photos as 100% recoverable in the demo but in fact they werent'. But I still got a lot of stuff back and this was after HD format. Good luck!

 

[FierceRed]

First of all, thank you all for your replies. I'm still evaluating all of my options, so please, any additional ideas/options would be greatly appreciated.

If this helps at all, the data I'm trying to recover is mostly music and video, namely MP3s and the standard video file types of .AVIs, .MPEGs, .MOVs, .WMVs and a few not so standard file types such as .OGMs/.OGGs and .MKVs (Matroska).

Follow-up questions for those that replied:

fisheye:
The GetDataBack program was one of the first things I saw when I ran a Google search on Data Recovery. From your post, it seems like you've bought the full version and used it on a drive with a very similar problem to my own.

• Was this program at all expensive to purchase?

• Did the program allow you to highlight or otherwise "Select All" a multitude of files to be recovered, and then let you recover them all at once; or was it a case of recovering one file at a time? (Which would suck cause I literally have thousands of files on that drive that I want back)

• Finally, did the program have any sort of file type recovery restrictions? For example, let's say I wanted to recover a file with an extension of literally .xyz. Since not even operating systems recognize that file type and have to be manually configured in order to recognize and attribute it to a program that can run it, does the GetDataBack program have those limitations as well? Can it only recover well known and recognized file types? Can it "see" lost files with weird file types such as .xyz? Can it be configured to recover weird file types with weird extensions?

alm4rr:
Sorry, I forgot to mention. The entire point of all of my data being on the 160GB HDD that failed is because I was in the process of making a physical backup. The data put on the 160GB HDD came from 2 other HDDs, a 40GB one and an 80GB one. Once the data was transferred to the 160GB HDD, I deleted it from the 40 and 80 HDD in order to free up it's room. So there's nothing to restore from the 40 and 80 HDDs.
This is just a case of really crappy luck in that, I bought a 160GB HDD for the sole purpose of creating a physical backup of all of my data incase of HDD failure of either my 40GB or 80GB HDD, I transfer the data over to the 160, delete the data from the 40 and 80, and then have the 160 fail on me...precisely the sort of situation I was trying to avoid in the first place.
Sigh, sucks to be me....

earthman:
Pretty much the same questions I asked of fisheye, I have to ask of you. I'll just copy and paste since it's no big deal.

• Was this program at all expensive to purchase?

• Did the program allow you to highlight or otherwise "Select All" a multitude of files to be recovered, and then let you recover them all at once; or was it a case of recovering one file at a time? (Which would suck cause I literally have thousands of files on that drive that I want back)

• Finally, did the program have any sort of file type recovery restrictions? For example, let's say I wanted to recover a file with an extension of literally .xyz. Since not even operating systems recognize that file type and have to be manually configured in order to recognize and attribute it to a program that can run it, does the GetDataBack program have those limitations as well? Can it only recover well known and recognized file types? Can it "see" lost files with weird file types such as .xyz? Can it be configured to recover weird file types with weird extensions?

Odd Bob:
It looks like you've already been through what I'm about to do: wade through all the program options available and filter out the crap ones in order to buy the golden one that will recover the most data for the least amount of $.
I have to ask though, were GetDataBack and Spinrite 6.0 on your list of programs that you compared to Recover My Files? If you could save me a bunch of time from downloading demos, trying them, and giving them a thumbs up or down, it would really help me out. Incidentely this couldn't have happened at a worse time for me since I'm just about to finish Study Week (a week off of College we get to study/sleep/party/not do homework) and am about to return to classes tommorow, Nov. 1st. So what little time I had to research data recovery programs just got cut by at least two thirds. 🙁
Ditto the above questions as well regarding the nature of "Recover My Files" options for muti-file recovery. If you could tell me about your experience with that as well, it would rock.

Once again, thank you to all repliers, both past and future.

 

[oldman420]

Originally posted by: earthman
First of all, if you are going to have that much irreplaceable data on a hard drive, it should be backed up to at least one other location. Secondly, if you go to grc.com and purchase spinrite 6.0, you may be able to save it. It is the only program I can think of that might help you.

The man speaks the truth

 

[Abhi]

My data also dissappeared a few months ago.

I used this software called Magic Recovery Pro, I scanned the HDD for lost partitions and it found all my files...

Download the demo and see if it works for you... It should. Google for it.

Once you download it, pm me and i ll guide you through it if need be... although the wizard is pretty self explanatory...

 

[Cheetah8799]

If this helps at all, the data I'm trying to recover is mostly music and video, namely MP3s and the standard video file types of .AVIs, .MPEGs, .MOVs, .WMVs and a few not so standard file types such as .OGMs/.OGGs and .MKVs (Matroska).

If this is the type of "data" that you download from Kazaa and other p2p stuff, then I suggest you just re-download everything. 😉

 

[Homerboy]

OnTrack Data Recovery worked wonders for me.

 

[fisheye]

Was this program at all expensive to purchase?

I think it's $80 to purchase. I 'aquired' my version through....other channels...

Did the program allow you to highlight or otherwise "Select All" a multitude of files to be recovered, and then let you recover them all at once; or was it a case of recovering one file at a time? (Which would suck cause I literally have thousands of files on that drive that I want back)

Yeah, you can select as many files as you want to recover at once.

Finally, did the program have any sort of file type recovery restrictions? For example, let's say I wanted to recover a file with an extension of literally .xyz. Since not even operating systems recognize that file type and have to be manually configured in order to recognize and attribute it to a program that can run it, does the GetDataBack program have those limitations as well? Can it only recover well known and recognized file types? Can it "see" lost files with weird file types such as .xyz? Can it be configured to recover weird file types with weird extensions?

Basically what the program does is scans your hard drive for start and end points of files and recreates your directory tree, so on the left pane you see a list of folders and whatnot, basically the same stuff you'd get from looking at a folder from Explorer. It'll find any types of files... What I did was 'recover' all the folders that I knew had stuff in them I wanted... takes a while to recover, but it did work the 2 times I needed to recover data (Once on a corrupt hard drive, files were visible but trying to access any crashed the PC, badly. The other time, I had accidentally deleted a folder with about 8 gigs of stuff (didn't go to the recycle bin) The program recovered the 8 gigs that I had in there at the time, as well as the other 20 gigs that used to be in the folder, that I had deleted ages ago 😛)

 

[Odd Bob]

Sorry, but I don't remember the names of what didn't work, just the one that did. You have a link in a previous post for GetBackData. Here's the ones for Recover-My-Files ( http://www.recovermyfiles.com/Download_RMF.html and one for Recovery Magic ( http://www.software-recovery.c...ic_demo/magic_demo.exe ). And here's a list of files that Recover-My-Files will search for.

Since you have recommendations for each of the programs, I would suggest picking just one that got a rave review and downloading the demo. Run the demo and if it will bring back the files that you need right now, go for it and work on the other stuff when you have more time.

Also, my experience is that both the search and the recovery process is a lengthy procedure taking several hours.