Spaced used...folders missing. Win 7

[xapo99]

I took a Seagate 1Tb disk to a friends house and removed about 100gb of folders and windows backups from his hard drive and put them on the Seagate.
I checked they were there before I left and deleted the ones on his drive, securely, as he is selling the PC.

I got home...and connected the drive to my PC (they are both Win 7 64bit machines) and in 'Computer' they space is showing as being used, in this case 830 left of 931gb or something, but the folders aren't there....

Now I have folders 'unhidden', I have tried using Recuva on deep scan and I have tried searching Google for MS solutions for about five hours. Basically I've lost all his family pics if I can't get to them.

Anyone have any insight ? Cheers

 

[sm625]

Try using a non-stupefied search tool such as FileLocator Lite 2010. Select the whole drive and let it display everything that is there.

 

[jolancer]

Never used anything above XP yet, but my guess would be maybe some kinda account file protection in win7? especially if you pulled them all from his official win 'My Documents' folder?...

anyway if it is anything like that, And loggin into the top Admin account cant see them (on winXP to do that you hit [ctrl + alt +[del twice]] befor login and then manually typed Name:Administrator Passord:XXXXetc ,like i said i never used win7 tho.

..Linux surely will see them if the files exist. One of the easyest to use would be a Live USB or CD from http://www.sysresccd.org/Download ,no install required... though you will need to do some basic commands if your not familiar with linux, In a nutshell,
"wizard" ..starts the GUI in sysresccd but i dont think it automaticlaly mounts partitions
"fdisk -l" ..lists partitions
"mkdir /mnt/name" ..make mount point for a partition
"ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt/name" ...mounts exampl (sdb1) ntfs partition onto your "name"
"ls -l /mnt/name" ...list all files in "name" dir

 

[xapo99]

Thanks for the input. I connected the disk via an enclosure to my Linux laptop and it showed the space used but still files were missing.

It is quite sad, for him and the pics, I feel bad !

 

[KillerBee]

HAve you plugged your drive back into his machine - maybe it's encrypted?

 

[jolancer]

I wouldn't give up, espeically if there very important to him. Theres a lot of data recovery software or what not out there, I'v never needed to use them tho so im not familiar, I just no theres a lot out there. If its important enough to him i'm sure he'd be willing to even pay someone who specializes in data recovery. as long as you dont delete/reformat the disk

I personally dont have the knowledge of what the heck happened, but am curiuose also... so if you dont mind me asking...
1) what system were they copyed from? MAC OSx, ntfs Windows, ext# Linux ???
2) where they just standard jpgs or something in a documents folder? or proprietary camera format in a proprietary camers software directory ?
3) how did you transfer, copy and past? what format is your external drive, ntfs?
4) was the external drive removed befor you securely erased his HDD? with like Dban or something?

EDIT: oh yea also not no offense if you already no this but... is that a modern distro of linux you used on your laptop? if your drive is NTFS i think older linux distros may have compatability issues

 

[xapo99]

Thanks to everyone again...I solved it..in a pretty odd way...i'd say if I was religious it was almost like divine intervention.


I looked about for file recovery type progs, tried about 5 and I think 4 of them were pretty much useless and did what Windows search does. Then I tried this one called File Scavenger or something and it did a deep scan and basically found everything that was missing. So I got to the end of the 2 hr scan and it said, if you wanna recover these, buy the software, but the link didn't work....

It also said, you can't recover the files to the same disk or partition so I tried to shrink the volume and make it into two partitions, but it said the drive was corrupted. So I was about to give up. I couldn't close the file recovery programme either and it wsa preventing Windows shutting down, so I waited and the whole system blue screened.

I turned it off and went outside for some air. I then came back in, and rebooted the PC which decided to tell me drive M: (my data disk in this case) needed to be looked at by Check disk. So it did a relatively quick scan and I saw something like the words, recovering or restoring flick past and the PC started.

Low and behold the missing files were back...but with padlocks on them..so I gave permissions and rebooted and it didn't do checkdisk and the padlocks were gone but it was calling the folders FOUND001 an FOUND002.

Anyway, I retrieved the files and backed them up to another disk...so weirdly the problem is resolved.:whiste: