Data recovery software recommendations please

[3 More Years]

Hello Everyone,

I have a hard drive where a customer wiped and installed a new operating system on to it without realising what they were doing. I believe there are software products that can recover data from the hard drive. Can anyone make any recommendations of products I can use? I don't mind if its free or paid. As long as it doesn't cost a huge amount, I am happy to pay for it.

Thank you.

 

[Porthos]

If you are asking this and they VALUE their data they need to stop using the computer and you need to send the drive to a data recovery service.

 

[labtech]

If the areas containing the files need to be recovered were overwritten by wipe and then the new installation, then no software can help. A software can help if there is data to be read. If there are 00s or whatever pattern the wipe was configured with, then 00s is not data, hence previous files unrecoverable.

But let's dig a little deeper as often action words, such as "wipe", often are used wrongfully by customers. How did they exactly wipe the drive (command, tool used, did it complete, etc)?

 

[Markverhyden]

If you are asking this and they VALUE their data they need to stop using the computer and you need to send the drive to a data recovery service.

And if this is just a fishing expedition look in the Resources. In addition to professional services there are several article for those looking to do it themselves.

 

[lcoughey]

As @Porthos just stated, if the data is valuable to the client and you are asking the question, you might want to seek the assistance of a data recovery pro. Although it seems like a simple task to just run a data recovery program, there is a lot more to it in order to get the best result possible without making things worse.

If you insist on going at it on your own, you should read the resource section of this forum about the data recovery procedures. As for software to use, I recommend using R-Studio, though it won't be free.

 

[DataMedics]

+1 for R-Studio. It's one of the few (if not the only) programs that can actually make some sense of the indexing near the middle of the NTFS partition. I've seen quite a few cases where it was able to make some sense of an overwritten file system and actually find folder structure too, when no other software could. You just have to be sure to let it scan the full drive before you stop it.

However if your client didn't just install the OS, but also copied all their other data back to it, then it's most likely to be overwritten data.

 

[Larry Sabo]

... and use the recovery program on a sector-by-sector clone of the original drive, of course--never the original drive.