user file recovery after factory restore/reset

[sys-eng]

Lady decided she needed to restore/reset her HP slimline S5213W (Windows 7) to original factory settings. During the reset, she copied all of her files to a Gateway computer (I do not know how they were copied yet). The next day, she tried to run the Gateway and it tried to boot to the files she had copied from the HP. She called Gateway support and was told to reset it to the original factory load too. Now she discovers that 20 years of pictures and office files are missing.

If only she had called me instead of Gateway. I will look for an Old Windows folders that is sometimes created during these restores. Any other suggestions?

 

[compnet]

The windows.old only shows up if you do a reinstall without formatting.. If she did a full factory reset, that formats, and reinstalls/images..

Rstudio and getdataback will be able to get some of the pictures and documents.. There's a good chance, some to most of the pictures will be corrupted/overwritten, gone, no matter what you do.

 

[sys-eng]

My experience with recovering large jpeg files has not been very good. If only 1% of the file is corrupted, then it still does not load. Office files seem to be much more accomodating to a little corruption.

 

[300DDR]

+1 on R-studio recommendation or GetDataBack (Fat or NTFS) -- the former will usually find too much stuff (i.e. incorrectly finds corrupt files). You should be able to get most files back still.

I think Sys-eng means: if 1% of a jpeg is bad, it won't open. I'm not sure about 1%, but certainly the majority needs to be recovered for it to open. But, with just 1% missing, it will likely open but may have artifacts or incorrect colors -- it likely won't be perfect.

 

[Larry Sabo]

I did a comparison of a few different recovery utilities and found PhotoRec the best at recovering picture files that were partly corrupted when recovered by other programs. Found the post I made on another forum about it...

Had a job to recover pictures from a 4GB flash drive last week and thought the following results comparison might be of interest:

- Recuva undeleted 197 pictures, of which 177 were readable (not "X"ed out)
- GetDataBack FAT recovered 221 usable pictures, plus some partial images
- PhotoRec (free for private and commercial use!) recovered 354 good images!

PhotoRec also recovers other file types and was pretty fast. I'm definitely going to experiment with using it in addition to my other recovery programs in the future. Surprising how it was so successful at recovering pictures that were "broken" or incomplete when recovered using the other programs.

That was back in 2010 so I don't know how they compare today, but it might be interesting to try running a comparison again.

 

[300DDR]

I would love to hear an updated comparison! Either way, good to know, thanks for sharing!

 

[sys-eng]

I have had fairly good success with Recuva for files but not pictures (JPEG). I did try PhotoRec once but gave up after it ran for a couple of days. It seems that jpeg is usually all or nothing.

This is for a lady at my church whose main income is Social Security so she cannot pay $hundreds for extensive data recovery. She did not know any better and Gateway support gave her bad advice and now she is missing about 20 years of pictures. Perhaps I can sell her a backup solution after this.

 

[300DDR]

I did try PhotoRec once but gave up after it ran for a couple of days.

Just FYI sys-eng, this most likely meant the drive had bad sectors (or some other problem that software recovery tools simply can't help with). PhotoRec would hit the bad sectors and probably try to read them many times (and not skip over them). This (bad sectors) is the main reason it would take days to run any software recovery tool. If the drive was in good shape, then any software tool should take no more than 12 hours, even if it's a 2tb drive.

 

[sys-eng]

I did a comparison of a few different recovery utilities and found PhotoRec the best at recovering picture files that were partly corrupted when recovered by other programs. Found the post I made on another forum about it...That was back in 2010 so I don't know how they compare today, but it might be interesting to try running a comparison again.

Do you know the nature of the files being recovered? Was the drive reformatted?

 

[Larry Sabo]

Just looked up the invoice: "- undelete pictures from 4GB SD card from camera..." No mention if the card had been reformatted. I assume they were just deleted by the user, but who knows. Sometimes I do a bulk delete on mine, sometimes I reformat the card.

I have recovered pictures from a hard drive where the drive had been reformatted, but my notes don't say what program(s) I used: "- recover pictures from an external drive John had used for backups but reformatted; - recovered a substantial number of pictures, although many folders still empty." Probably Easeus Data Recovery and/or GetDataBack NTFS. I recall trying two programs but not having the success that was hoped for.

 

[sys-eng]

PhotoRec recovered many jpg files but 99% of them are tiny thumbnails.
Darn!

 

[jft135]

I've actually had pretty good results recovering after a format with Recover My Files and/or Easus Data Recovery Wizard Pro. I usually get at least 75% back intact.

 

[sys-eng]

Well after about a week of trying different programs, I am giving up on it. There was little difference in the recovery rate of the programs I tried except that some recovered more files but they would not open due to corruption. This was probably a tough challenge for any recovery program. The disk drive was probably very fragmented in the beginning which makes recovering multi-MB photo files unlikely. The C: partition was reformatted and the factory image was restored (thanks to Gateway tech support). Then the user created a couple of user accounts and probably did some other activities on the PC trying to find/recover her files. In the end, probably less than 1% of the user type files (xls, doc, msg, txt, jpg, mp3, mp4, qdf, pdf, ppt) recovered are actually the files that she inadvertently deleted.

 

[sys-eng]

R-Studio vs GetDataBack

I tried the R-Studio trial and it failed to produce much of anything that I could view. I tried GetDataBack for NTFS and was pleasantly surprised at how it reconstructed the directory trees and files. I am placing an order for it tonight.