I just lost 40gbs of mp3's and my wifes modeling photos.

[aaronpeek]

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1029069316#post1029069316


I just bought this WD 160gb drive to recover the same data from a maxtor drive, everything was fine until i did a windows repair this afternoon. Apparently it decided to format the d: Drive.


that is about $7,000 worth of music.

[unhappy_mage]

You can try utilities like GetDataBack to retrieve your data. Failing that, a data recovery company will be able to get it back, albeit at about $600.

http://www.hardfolding.com/ftag1.php/mem/150072.png (http://www.hardfolding.com?go=38&tm=33&id=150072)http://www.hardfolding.com/utag.php/mem/1392.png (http://www.hardfolding.com?go=36&id=1392)

[aaronpeek]

You can try utilities like GetDataBack to retrieve your data. Failing that, a data recovery company will be able to get it back, albeit at about $600.

http://www.hardfolding.com/ftag1.php/mem/150072.png (http://www.hardfolding.com?go=38&tm=33&id=150072)http://www.hardfolding.com/utag.php/mem/1392.png (http://www.hardfolding.com?go=36&id=1392)

I am trying a free test of recover my files, it seems to be finding them. WHy the hell can't stuff like this be free with windows? wow.

[draksia]

I have had good luck with File Scavenger.

It is a lot cheaper then $600 and it has a demo so can determine if it will be able to recover your files.

http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm

[Talonz]

http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.html?testdisk.html

One of the best partition recoverers that I know of.

It's saved 3 drives for me and my roommates.

[serbiaNem]

GetDataBack has had the best recovery rate and stability of the programs I've tested.

Modelling photos eh? Lucky you :p

[DocNsane]

http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoverydatarecovery/

Whatever you do, don't touch the drive with anything that would write on it. I've had a lot of success with OnTrack's self recovery tool. Been able to restore multiple partitons of a disk after it had been repartitioned and reformated.

[aaronpeek]

anyone with something that would be free? i can see the data in "recovermyfiles" i do not need hardcore.

[aaronpeek]

my g4 was able to get it all back, for free :)

[agent420]

Glad to hear that - you're lucky. Now what is the moral of this story? Oh yeah.... BACKUP :p

[aaronpeek]

bought a 500 gig lacie drive for this purpose. Already on it.

[Ice Czar]

PC Inspector file recovery is free

just verify each and every file before you write anything to that drive incase you want to try to recover again

you sort of get what you pay for
I too employ File Scavenger, also used Restorer 2000 back in the day
these are of course direct sector scanners, not the same thing as partition recovery
for tht I use Reproman (an old version of what is now DIY Data Recovery's Diskpatch

but youve already formatted so repair of the partition is pointless

formatting overwrites the metadata (http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/ntfs/archFiles-c.html), or at least part of the metadata
the rest of the drive is left alone, there just isnt anything pointing to it anymore
its like a scrambled phonebook with no table of contents or index


have fun looking at all the photos, and listening to all the music

then back it up ;)

[eastvillager]

Glad to hear that - you're lucky. Now what is the moral of this story? Oh yeah.... BACKUP :p


The second moral is understand what you're doing. Windows doesn't just go out and reformat a partition without any input whatsoever.

[Ice Czar]

always advisable to physically disconnect drives not directly involved for those with the possibility of getting confused ;)

pilot error is the leading cause of data loss :eek:
even old hands screw up, I lost a RAID5 array because I read the manual :p
only my BIOS revision had an issue and didnt automatically rerecognize the drives

you know how many possble permutations there are of 6 drives to 6 channels?

720

now the drives channel ownership is marked with a felt tip

[aaronpeek]

The second moral is understand what you're doing. Windows doesn't just go out and reformat a partition without any input whatsoever.


As fairly niave as my orginal post my sound, i do know what i am doing.

I normally have two backups, one drive on ide in the computer and a large usb drive for dumping.

However, the drive i had in there as a back up failed, and i put my usb drive into the case and had no second back up yet. (no time as of yet)

THis has since been fixed, at behest of my wife, who was none to happy with me :)

[uzor]

always advisable to physically disconnect drives not directly involved for those with the possibility of getting confused ;)

pilot error is the leading cause of data loss :eek:
even old hands screw up, I lost a RAID5 array because I read the manual :p
only my BIOS revision had an issue and didnt automatically rerecognize the drives

you know how many possble permutations there are of 6 drives to 6 channels?

720

now the drives channel ownership is marked with a felt tip

eep!! how many of those permutations did you get through before you found the right one?


http://www.hardfolding.com/ftag1.php/mem/1771.png (http://www.hardfolding.com?go=38&id=1771)

[Tyklfe]

....snip....
even old hands screw up, I lost a RAID5 array because I read the manual :p
....snip....



Ditto - and I pray I never have that happen to me again....... man that sucked.

[nobody_here]

try testdisk 5.8 (http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.html?testdisk.html), or whatever version is out now, completely free, will take a partition that was previously there and reset the MBR to make it NTFS or FAT32 again, saved me once, same situation, as long as you accidentally did a partion delete and not a format, not sure about if you formatted it or not

bah, someone already mentioned it, hope it works