Need advice on doing a Data recovery on a laptop HD

[Psynaut]

My friend swore to me she backed up her data on her laptop before I ran System Recovery last night to reinstall her XP to its original state. Today, she called me in tears because her Backup didn't save all the pictures from the past 8-weeks of her new-born baby, nor her honeymoon... sigh.

Now I need to run a data recovery program to attempt to recover the data from the 90% of her hard drive that wasn't over-written by her new windows installation. I have, in the past, recovered data from a corrupted HD that I installed into my computer as a secondary drive and I have access to several programs to try.

Here is my question: Can I install data recovery software onto the C drive of her computer and attempt to recover data from the same drive that the data recovery software is running from? Or must I pull the Hard drive from the laptop and connect it to my computer to run data recovery? (I'm pretty certain there is no software that would allow me to connect the laptop to my computer to look at it's HD from my computer's "My Computer" without pulling the HD, right?)

Thanks, for any advice that anyone can offer. I need to recover this data for her, but would love it if I didn't have to pull the HD from her laptop. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

[RebateMonger]

You need to hook the hard drive up to another computer. Then install one of the many data recovery programs onto the other computer and see how many files it can recover. Do NOT install the data recovery program on the damaged hard drive.

 

[Gunbuster]

Have her stop using and turn of the PC immediately. Boot to a live CD/USB with a USB HDD attached to offload the data. Run getdataback http://www.runtime.org/

 

[razel]

Agree with all the above. It's probably too late for a partition recovery with testdisk or ontrack which is accurate, but you could try testdisk to see if it finds any old ones.

Install the drive into another computer and try running photorec/testdisk. Of the three 'current' data recovery programs I use, I've had my best luck with that one. It's completely free and runs within Windows. However, it is not a user friendly GUI. Its text driven, but it is very powerful.

The other two I would also run... Recuva. It is constantly updated and is also free. Runs in Windows and is the easiest to use. The other is the golden oldie, Ontrack. It is not free, but its like photorec/testdisk with a user friendly face. It allows you to recover one file at a time without having to pay, so it'll be useful if the other two programs cannot find a super precious file they want.

Also, you can try to recover pictures from the camera's flash drive. Chances are probably better there to find old pictures.

 

[RebateMonger]

As a note:
It's very important to understand how your backup software works, what it backs up, and how the recovery is done. You should test your backups to ensure that they are usable and that you are backing up what you think you are backing up.

I've seen lots of folks who THINK they are backing up all of their important data, only to find out, too late, that they are missing important stuff.