Program to recover lost data?

[Acleacius]

Never had to recover data from hard disk, which had it's partitions deleted. It was also formatted in NTFS during WinXP install but never had any data beside the preboot install files. As I understand it, crashed on reboot and has never been written over.

So basically I would like to help them (if possible) restore the partitions and data on the same drive OR will it be necessary to copy all the files on to another drive (if they can be found, of course)?

Thanks for any help, tips or links.

 

[C1]

Behind successful recovery is insight regarding what the mechanism of the failure was.

Generally an OS crash doesnt delete partitions - instead some critical system files may only be corrupted in which case an OS repair may only be needed.

If you really believe that the partition(s) have been deleted then find a suitable free Undelete (or recovery) software utility from Raymond:

http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2008/01/24/top-10-free-data-recovery-software/

 

[MustISO]

So the drive partitions were deleted, then the drive was formatted and XP was partially installed and now they would like to recover the file? Which files, the XP files or some data they had on the drive?

I have good success with GetDataBack and Recuva to recover files. You'll need another disk (maybe just a different partition) to copy the data to.

 

[Acleacius]

Iirc, the partitions were deleted via WinXP installing, then they formatted with NTFS on the newly created partition. Once WinXP had installed all the initial files, (e.g. not booted into WinXP enviroment), the system rebooted for the first time. Crashing at the first WindXP screen as it tried to start expanding/installing in the WinXP environment. The drive has not been written over, since it got partitioned and formatted.

There were 4 or 5 partitions originally, they want those back as they didn't intend to delete them only the C:\ (they got confused). My plan was to Slave the drive, try to find a good Undelete program and try to restore everything on the same drive. Since I've never done it, wasn't sure of a good program OR if I could actually restore the files to the actual original drive. Instead of having to copy the recovered files onto a different drive, since that would mean I would need another 400gig drive. Actually could probably get by with less as they don't need every single file since they intended to reinstall anyway.

Ahh, see from the link shouldn't try to recover to the same drive, glad I asked first and at least they knew not to try using the drive after deletion. Will try GetDataBack and/or Recuva.



Thanks for the link and tips.

 

[Rackmountsales]

If you formatted the broken drive already then you're pretty much screwed. There is a slight chance you may get some files out though but no guarantees.
Once I used GetDataBack to help a friend retrieve his files for his personal business and it was able to retrieve all his important files back.