computer help?

[powerskipper]

Is there any way of recovering data on a computer after a full system destructive recovery.
Just lost a lot of stuff I wanted to keep, And No I did not back it all up,

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Julie

 

[BrendanS]

Yes, but it will probably cost you a fair bit. There are companies who specialise in this - send them your hard drive, and they will recover and restore to a new drive. They will probably be able to get a large amount of the data on there depending on what was overwritten in the recovery. The more you use the computer, the more likely it is you will damage any lost files

There are utilitites that can do the same but not to the level the experts can do. Run the utility and it will tell you which files are deleted but recoverable, and how much of the file is recoverable.

<hr width=100% size=1>Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabris, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.

 

[DavidP]

Hi
If its anything like the Virus i had then no ( Blue screen with the words physical memory dump ,or something similar to that) ,lost everything and spent around 3 to 4 hours reformating the drives ect ,well a friend did then changed the opperating systen to avoid being targeted.

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[Talbot]

I had a hard disk die, and looked at the cost of recovery and was horrified. I eventually went to a little back street expert who did his best and got 90% of the old data at a fraction of the quoted cost from other places who would probably have done no better. If you are interested business is just north of Portsmouth, and send me a pm.

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[Dave_Snelson]

Tricky but not impossible. There are programs available that run from one pc to recover the info on another - not expensive and if you use another friends machine on the net you can sort this out quickly. It must be said that from a full system restore, where you will have re-loaded the operating system (I presume you had to load Windows 200X or XP) this completely overwrites and obliterates everything - so you will be wasting your time and money. If you didn't have to re-load the op system you can get away with this. Normally, files that are "deleted" aren't actually deleted at all, they are merely marked at the front of the file name with an ? sign (I think) and that marks them for potential deletion subject to available disc space. When, eventually the space with that file is needed, it is deemed available and therefore overwritten by the new info.

Clear as mud??

<hr width=100% size=1>Madoc Yacht Club
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[BrendanS]

Even with a complete reinstall, a huge amount of the data will still be on the disk, and recoverable.Even after reformatting most data can be recovered

Police depts have experts that can still recover data where every byte has been overwritten - to completely overwrite data beyond recovery takes amazing effort, with randomised writing of each byte at least 5 times

<hr width=100% size=1>Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabris, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.

 

[boatless]

Yes. Easyrecovery from ontrack.de, superb.

Have a free copy if you pm your email address.

<hr width=100% size=1>my opinion is complete rubbish, probably.

 

[cliff]

Take it to a "back street" repair shoppe.
I did when I fitted a second drive with "an attitude" problem and fried my main drive. £10 cih for 95% recovery (all personal files included luckily). Mind you I did buy a couple of new drives from him and a few other bits and bobs.

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Stay put when I hit you!

 

[BarryH]

Excellent! Is this a case of "fixing it 'till its broke". My kids are experts at that. Glad I'm not the only one to suffer!

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[powerskipper]

someone who will remain nameless! was putting a new hard drive in to give more storage and got it a bit wrong!!!


Thanks to all who have helped in this matter, /forums/images/icons/cool.gif

<hr width=100% size=1><A target="_blank" HREF=http://powerskipper.mysite.freeserve.com/>http://powerskipper.mysite.freeserve.com/</A>
Julie

 

[Jim44]

Not that hard, there is a program forget the name, Erasedisk i think, which does this. Once had to return computers to an old company and wanted to ensure disk was clean, I used this program and was very effective, formated the disk after just to make sure mind.


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[BrendanS]

It is easy if you have a program designed to do it - (not all are very good though, you need at least 5 passes of 5 different random passes of every single byte) It very hard to do it by accident!.

Some programs which are supposed to completely erase data don't succeed, and formatting actually does almost nothing to erase data if someone is determined to recover it, it just sets header blocks as empty, and doesn't erase the actual data - very easy to turn header block back on.

<hr width=100% size=1>Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabris, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.

 

[Jim44]

I ran the program then formatted the disk the used FDISK to delete partitions and re-created them then formated the blank disk.

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[boatless]

As Brendan says, FDisk (format) does not get rid of data. If you want to find it that is.

<hr width=100% size=1>my opinion is complete rubbish, probably.

 

[BrendanS]

eraserdisk will do the job, it's quite effective.

Formatting and removing partions however has little effect on data recovery to someone with the right tools. Fdisk is a high level format, it does almost nothing to remove data

The real forensic pro's (government and research bods, using equipment the average person doesn't have) can do some quite scary things. they use very fine heads that can look at magnetic realignment, and work out what originally binary was (0 or 1), even if overscanned several times.

even average users can recover amazing amounts of stuff using simple recovery programs. The original point I made is that it is actually quite difficult to erase data, at least by accident. You have to go out of your way to do it using low level formatting with multiple random passes - and even then, if MI5 or FBI wanted to examine your disks, they may be able to recover fragments depending on how efective the utility you used was

<hr width=100% size=1>Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabris, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.

 

[Mike21]

Legged it to Sweden for couple of days to let her cool down/forums/images/icons/blush.gif
In future i'll leave her to muck it up by herself, then she'll be nice when she want's it fixed/forums/images/icons/smile.gif

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[powerskipper]

huuurraaaa

found a program that has got 90% of data back,
<A target="_blank" HREF=http://powerskipper.mysite.freeserve.com/>http://powerskipper.mysite.freeserve.com/
Julie