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File Recovery After Format

G

Galco

n00b
Joined
Sep 20, 2004
Messages
38
Alright. I posted here last night about a modem, but that is no longer even my bother. I was tired, and forgot to do something I should have done. I am at my aunts house fixing her computer. I was doing ok. She has 2 HD, I installed XP on one, copied the only files she wanted to keep : 4 years of photos of her babies. Then formatted the 1st HD, and installed XP on it. Then, I was going to copy all those files back onto the 1st HD from the 2nd. But, I got tired, and totally forgot. I went to sleep, but remembered I needed to format the 2nd HD. I did, about 20 minutes ago. Then, I remembered. I forgot to copy her pictures to the 1st HD. So, I just deleted the only shit she wanted it. I am panicking, and have no idea what the hell to do. She was so happy I was able to save her pictures. And now I've fucked up. Does anyone, anyone know what i could do? I downloaded a couple of file recovery programs, and they found some. A bunch of volume-something files. Does anyone have experience with this? What should I do? My brain is swimming.


-alan


Edit : Ok, I've had time to calm down. And I was thinking I could take this HD home with me, since I read that the shit is still on there, because I have installed or moved nothing onto it since I formatted about 40 minutes ago. Would it matter if I took it home and hook it up to my computer? Would it need this computer? Even if you don't know, I totally thank you for taking your time and reading my panic. Thanks.
 
Do you know if the 2nd drive originally had an OS on it? How was it formatted before (NTFS. FAT32, FAT)? And how is it formatted now?

(thinking the old MS-Dos 6.22 unformat command might work)
 
active undelete is good ..

plug in the hard disk .. i hope you didn't over write it ..

and run active undelete on your pc .. you should be able to recover EVERYTHING ..

Ofcourse this depends on the type of formatting you did ... ;)
 
you dont need that computer
and all you have erased and overwritten at this point is metadata
any direct sector scan should easily recover the Lions share of the real data

the tricky part being verifying all the data you recover before your able to reuse that drive
(nothing quite as bad as recovering something only to find it actually corrupted and the original gone)

in the paidware category
Filescavenger (but it has a rather restrictive license)
 
I have a good program called GetDataBack there is one for NTFS and one for FAT32...I'll PM you the details on how to get it..
 
GetDataBack should work assuming you didn't do a full format. If you did a quick format then you should be able to recover the data.
 
Erland said:
Get Data Back also works on full formats...
Click to expand...

I was under the impression a full format writes over everything on the drive... essentially turning every bit to a 0.

maybe I'm wrong, I'm not going to argue because I'm not exactly sure.
 
Matt126 said:
I was under the impression a full format writes over everything on the drive... essentially turning every bit to a 0.

maybe I'm wrong, I'm not going to argue because I'm not exactly sure.
Click to expand...


It's supposed to..but...you have to have special tools to do it...and if he just used windows or the dos format.exe then he should be good to go. a "FULL" format takes serveral hours to do with these special tools. and even then it's still possable to get stuff off of it. I work on computers on a daily basis including data recovery's and a windows FULL format or quick format GetDataBack still works on.

But yeah they do give you the impression that it writes over everything but in fact it doesn't..I belive what it does is it changes the first letter of every file so you can't do a tipical "Search" for it. and a quick format just erases the fat table...
 
There are many levels of formatting a hard disk.

1) quick
2) low level format
3) don't know what it's called but it does low level format 3 times. Writes 0's to the hard disk then 1's then something random such as the date. Even after that is done, you can still get back some information. That's why companies, governments and whatever else destroy their hard disks.

Anywho, I hope you were able to recover the pictures.
 
the only difference between a quick format and a full format is if the disk gets scanned for errors or not, all it rewrites is the metadata in either case
(if its a full format it also locks out bad sectors found in the scan)

a low level format is impossible outside of a factory these days due to the areal density

what people insist on calling a low level format is actually a zero fill utility

not the same thing ;)
 
Ice Czar said:
the only difference between a quick format and a full format is if the disk gets scanned for errors or not, all it rewrites is the metadata in either case
(if its a full format it also locks out bad sectors found in the scan)

a low level format is impossible outside of a factory these days due to the areal density

what people insist on calling a low level format is actually a zero fill utility

not the same thing ;)
Click to expand...

Thank you for clearing that up..
 
well..on topic i use ontrack...but i dont really think you can just get it from the web, the only time i havent recovered something from ontrack is when the drive is actually fried, as in clicking or bios does not see it, ive even had it (at least i think it was ontrack he used) recover data from what i call "governmet wipe"
which is similar to zero fill... it like goes over the drive like 6 times, writes, writes, writes

off topic from your sig ^^
Stealing is when you take somthing from someone and leave them with nothing......Were just copying
Click to expand...

thats funny as shit i'm gonna remember that one
 
Thanks fellas, I'm going to give it all a try. I really hope I can get it back. I did a full format. None of that quick stuff.
 
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