Lost Data

[brandt]

I accidently (dont ask) formatted my flash drive and lost some very very important files. I've tried PC Inspector File Recovery and it doesnt find it... you guys got any "magical" programs out there? thanks

 

[Fardringle]

I have successfully recovered files from hard drives that were formatted multiple times using a program called File Scavenger (v2.1) from QueTek Consulting. Their corporate licenses can be pretty spendy, but the single user license (can only be installed on one PC) has been all I've needed for small office systems and it only costs $39.95. I just install it on one computer then plug any 'lost' drives into that PC to run the recovery on them. One particular office I manage seems particularly proficient at losing files, so it has been a great investment there.

I even managed to recover files once from a drive that had bad sectors in the MBR portion of the drive, which normally makes the disk extremely hard to read, but I think I just got lucky on that one.

As with any file recovery program, if the sectors where the files were stored has been written over (very possible if you have already saved other files to the drive) then you may not be able to recover the files no matter what you do, but out of the dozens of programs I've tried (including PC Inspector), this is the only one I could find that could actually recover files from a formatted drive. All others I looked at that do not cost thousands of dollars could only recover files that had not been formatted...


edit: I re-read your message and wanted to mention that I have also used File Scavenger when I accidentally formatted a flash drive (you aren't the only one ) and it was able to recover all but one of the files and that file was corrupt before I formatted the drive...


edit again: I forgot to include a link. http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm

 

[brandt]

thanks