URGENT Laptop data recovery NEED HELP

[kcbass]

Bought a new laptop two days ago from best buy and left it in store to have them set it up. BIG MISTAKE! I paid them to do a data transfer of all my important files (documents, emails, pics, etc) from the old laptop to the new one. One of the service guys saw my old backups (more than a year old) in the laptop case and just assumed that the backup was done. He then formatted the drive and reinstalled the OS. I desperately need these files recovered. How can I recover a formatted hard drive? They already tried a program called search and recover and it failed to find anything. These files are important for contract negotiations and business transactions and are worth a lot of money. I cannot emphasize how badly we need these files.

Please help

 

[kcbass]

Desperately need help recovering my documents, outlook emails and address book, and jpegs. bump

 

[johnjkr1]

You should contact a reputable data recovery service like ontrack or drive savers if the data is that important to you. There are some tools that can be used to recover formatted data, but their success rate isn't that good. Stuff like this:

http://discount-evidence-eliminator.com/sw/file_scavenger.htm

http://www.webattack.com/Freeware/system/fwdatarecovery.shtml

 

[n0cmonkey]

Do a search on recovery. This gets asked frequently, but I never remember what people recommend.

 

[kcbass]

can you give me links for ontrack and drive savers? I searched on google, but didn't find their sites 

 

[johnjkr1]

www.ontrack.com

www.drivesavers.com

 

[kcbass]

Thanks. I called drivesavers, and as it turns out, they have a contract with best buy for referrals that best buy can't recover. When they told us our data was gone, they never once mentioned drive savers....

 

[johnjkr1]

Best buy computer service is not a well run operation, it all depends on the tech you get...and it seems you got a bad one. Hope you get your data back....and start backing it up.

 

[kcbass]

Now that we have a laptop that can burn cd's we sure will

 

[huesmann]

I hope you've learned a valuable lesson. If you don't have an IT dept, cultivate a computer geek as your friend. Worst Buy, CrapUSA, etc. are not the most reliable places to go for important computer works.

 

[kcbass]

Unfortunately, I'm just home for the summer from college, and I AM the IT department....

 

[kcbass]

Also, I found a bunch of .dbx files when I was trying to recover some outlook mailboxes, but I can't get Outlook 2000 to import them. I tried every file type they offer, but nothing worked. Does anyone know how I can get these things to import? 

 

[BigJimbo]

is best buy going to pay for this recovery for you?

Not that it matters or anything but all their techs at my local store i think one is A+ certified. and when in line to return something (same desk area) a guy picking up his PC asked what was wrong and the tech had no idea what he was talking about.

They make 7 and change there and minimum wage here in FL is 5.15 that just goes to show you that they arnt going to be brainiacs

 

[kcbass]

best buy hasn't agreed to pay for it yet, but I think they're going to. It's a pretty expensive process. Still waitint on someone that knows .dbx files 

 

[Askalon]

here is a thing on restoring .dbx files

dbx file restore

 

[kcbass]

That is an AWESOME little tool. Thanks so much for that link