Restore Help

[donkon]

HI
I have A Very Big Problem !!!!
I had HP Pavilion a1220n desktop computer. One week ago I did recovery using HP_Recovery (this is small partition on hard drive made by HP with some restore software) After restarting computer it asked if I want to make backup and I agreed. When everything was finished I recognized that few folders from desktop disappeared
One of them contained my wife's collection of family photographs (period of 10 years).
She didn't make any backup and really now I don't have a life because of this lost. Every time when somebody mention something about computer I hear from her what I've done with her pictures. If someone will have some advices or help to restore ( bring back to life these folders I'll be appreciative to the end of my life

[Joe Average]

THIS IS A LONG POST, so read it and accept the advice given based on decades of doing this, or blow it off, it's your choice.

Well, there's no way for any of us from our perspectives to say yes or no on this with respect to the recovery.

If the photos existed on the main partition (C) and you finished whatever backup process was put in place before the factory restore, and those photos were not included in the backup process before the recovery began and after the recovery they're gone it is very safe to say they are gone forever, sadly.

A lot of times when restore software asks if you want to make a backup of your data, it will only back up items in some specific places, like My Documents, and perhaps some user data in the Docs and Settings folders, but if you've got custom folders in other places, even on the Desktop, that stuff is simply not going to make it into the backups. The restore software has rather limited capabilities, so it can't tell what's a personal document or a system file unless they're in the places the backup software is already going to look.

If you put all your pictures in My Photos, and that software backs it up, then you have some safety there. But if you manually created a folder on the Desktop and you put all your pics in that folder, maybe calling it Pictures or Family Photos, even, that's not going to make it into the backup process.

The problem here is that's what I think has happened, and as such, because they weren't included in the backup, there's a definite certainty that when the restoration process was done, it completely overwrote the content that existed on the C: partition before the restore was begun.

If that's truly the case, there's almost no hope of recovery, but...

It all depends on how much was on the drive in the first place. Take this example, if you will:

Say you have a 40GB system partition, drive C. You put a lot of stuff on it, and it begins to fill up over time. Say you put over 20GB of stuff on it, and when you got to the point where you added some family photos, they'd be stored around the 21GB point into the partition.

Now say you decide to do that restore for some reason; it could be an issue with a virus, or some other problems that force you to do a factory restore. You back up whatever data you believe should be saved, then you set the restore in motion. Now, typically, a factory restore isn't going to put 20 or more gigs of data back on the C: drive, so let's say for example the restore ends up consuming about 10GB of space, that's pretty accurate in this day and age. That's the OS being restored, and a lot of the factory installed crap.

Sticking with this example, as soon as the restore process is complete, you've got ~10GB of fresh content on the drive, and a 40GB partition once again. While everything past the point of about 10GB up to the end of the drive at the 40GB point appears empty, that's because the restore process laid out a new file allocation table to work with, effectively overwriting the previous one that told the OS and the hard drive where your files were

What does that mean to you? Well... it means your files, or more accurately the wife's family photos could still be there on the drive and accessible, but you'll need to get some data recovery software to even find it.

The problem with this is not only have you restored the machine and possibly wrote over the photos in that process, but you say this restore was done a week ago, so that means not only has the computer been in use the past week, with several people using it probably, but new data has been added to the system drive, downloads, pictures, music, web pages, you've probably re-installed your old programs, games, etc.

See what this means? It means if you'd realized this when you did the restore, that was the point when the data recovery stood the best possible chance of success. As it is, with a week of users on the machine, and the stuff I just mentioned all possible activities, there is now a very very slim chance of successful recovery, if any at all.

You need to STOP USING THAT COMPUTER, PERIOD. Right now, this moment, unplug it if you can, don't even shut down, seriously, as that just writes more new data to the drive.

The big problem then becomes how do you recover data off a computer you're not able to use. That's an entire tutorial that I can't go into right now and would take hours to teach, unfortunately. :(

My procedure when doing this type of data recovery - and I've been doing data recovery for over 20 years now, with nearly a 98% success ratio for complete recovery. The 2% is various stages of recovery, even nothing at all recovered. But you have to stop using that machine, that is CRUCIAL at this point, seriously, it cannot be stressed enough.

I have a custom made bootable CD that takes me into a Windows-like enivironment (commonly know as a PE - preinstallation environment) these days, and I've modified that disc to include my most commonly used applications for virus removal, malware/spyware cleanup, and of course data recovery. Some of the tools I use cost me a shitload of cash over the years: EasyRecovery Professional, R-Studio, and a few others, but because I did this stuff for a living they all paid off over the years with money back in my pocket and a client list in the thousands of satisfied and very happy people.

There just isn't a simple fix for this, nor a simple way to just save the pics, if they're even savable to any degree. I wish I could go into more detail but, it's just a massively complex thing based on your situation as you've explained it in your post.

My suggestion would be to contact a professional data recovery service like Drive Savers (www.drivesavers.com) and do a request for a quote on recovery. It would require you sending them the physical hard drive, but if there's anyone out there that could get it back - and since I can't do it - that would be my strongest recommendation.

Someplace local might be able to handle the job, but they may charge even more, there's no way to know. Geek Squad at Best Buy has data recovery services available also, but to be honest, I've never met anyone that works at Geek Squad (and I've been to about 45 Best Buys across the US) and not one person employed as an "Agent" gave me the idea they had a clue about what they were doing, sadly.

Good luck, regardless... and I hope you get some of the pics back.