Recovering from a "recovery"

[Skyhooker]

Hi, everyone,

My best friend's wife, in an attempt to fix what might have been a simple thing for me, ran HP's recovery partition restoration, and their computer is now back to factory settings. Is there any one program or technique you'd recommend to recover their files, especially those that might have been overwritten by the "recovery?" Their priority is family photos. I have some that I've used successfully for commercial jobs, but this job is even more important to me since they're "family," so I thought I'd run it by the forum. It's a Windows XP Home machine.

Thanks!


Sky

 

[NYJimbo]

Did they do a standard or full recovery?. It sounds like they did a full or "destructive" recovery in which case you might not be able to find anything. Can you see older folders with anything familiar like pictures, settings or data from before the recovery ?.

 

[Jory]

You might want to check and see if there is a folder somewhere with all their stuff in it. I've seen people do recoveries from their HD, and the installer backs up everything first.

 

[seedubya]

Download and run the trial of GetDataBack. It'll recover anything that's recoverable. http://www.runtime.org/

 

[RyanMeray]

Download and run the trial of GetDataBack. It'll recover anything that's recoverable. http://www.runtime.org/

I'd second this.

The nice thing about factory recoveries is that they're going to overwrite the initial portion of the disk, 99% of the time leaving the user's files, positioned later in the drive, intact.

Getdataback is designed for scenarios like this where the data is deleted from the file table but not actually overwritten.

 

[Majestic]

Download and run the trial of GetDataBack. It'll recover anything that's recoverable. http://www.runtime.org/

Definitely! GetDataback has been invaluable to me! It will do the job.

Majestic

 

[Skyhooker]

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. I had to run out the door soon after I posted, and after my friend had dropped off the computer. I pulled the drive and connected it to my test machine with my IDE =>USB cable and started Recuva running while I was out to see what it would find, since it took almost no time to configure and start, and I had almost no time before I had to leave. I'm now saving the results to another external drive, but it looks like it might be the entire drive's contents (pre-recovery). I may run GetDataBack overnight or tomorrow to compare results, but it looks promising so far.

@RyanMeray: I wasn't sure about the location of the recovery overwrite, but I was sure hoping that it would be, as you say, in the same location as the originals. Good to know - thanks.

Once again, thanks for the help!


Sky