lost data, any possibility of recovery

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xFuryofFivex

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Aug 28, 2004
Messages
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I recently had some trouble with flashing my bios.. and my harddrive got erased... is there anyway i can get my data back if i have already formated that partition
 
xFuryofFivex said:
I recently had some trouble with flashing my bios.. and my harddrive got erased... is there anyway i can get my data back if i have already formated that partition
Click to expand...

yes and no depending if you've written OVER the sectors of your data. Go get yourself a program that reads the sectors on the harddrive. A simple search on www.downloads.com will show some results. I believe I used a program called GetDataBack awhile ago. Worked like a charm.
 
alright, im tryin the suggestion that Zdioas mentioned... hopefully that will work...
 
this isn't my speciality, but i've heard that there's a Norton app that can help with this...

someone explain, i think it's if you've low-level formatted (i understand that to mean written over w/ 00000's) then you can't recover, but if you've pseudo-random overwritten you can recover?
 
Basically as long as the sectors on your harddrive that previously stored information haven't been written over it yet, you can recover.

Formatting eliminates the partitions and boot records on your harddrive. Therefore, if the sectors on the harddrive aren't written over, whatever that were previously stored in those sectors can be recovered.

I am no Harddrive wiz but that's pretty much all I know how to explain :)
 
Zdioas... that program worked like a charm... retrieved all my lost information.... i give u a golden star for effor...

im show this to my teacher 2morrow at school.. its a really good program.. wish i had it before this problem

thanks bro
 
how come no one ever spells my name right? :p

Glad I can help and that it worked out well for you :)
 
formatting simply rewrites the Metadata
all the rest of your data is in plain sight for recovery by a direct sector scan, however you need somewhere to recover that data to.

Id recommend Filescavenger in the paidware category (about $40 a single license)
PC Inspector File Recovery in freeware
(there is a difference, verify the files before proceeding youll get alot more usable files first time out with Filescavenger, files that dont work need to be targeted again for recovery)

to attampt to repair the damage in place and reconstruct the partition and MFS
Id recommend DIY Data Recovery's Diskpatch (again about $40)

for a good idea of how ntfs works from a recovery point of view
http://www.ntfs.com/

best proceedure is 1st recovery and then repair
cheap seats recovery is to do a sector by sector clone of the drive (switch in Ghost) and then attempt a repair on it or the old drive, meaning you have a spare in need, that is if you have Ghost already
http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/pfdocs/1998082612540625
if needed suppress errors

-FRO
Bad disk
Forces Ghost to continue cloning even if the source contains bad clusters.
Symantec Ghost 8.0
Norton Ghost 2003

-IA
Clone
The Image All switch forces Ghost to perform a sector-by-sector copy of all partitions. By default, when copying a partition from a disk to an image file or to another disk, Ghost examines the source partition and decides whether to copy just the files and directory structure, or to do a sector-by-sector copy. If it understands the internal format of the partition, it defaults to copying the files and directory structure.
Generally this is the best option. However, if a disk has been set up with special hidden security files that are in specific positions on the partition, the only way to reproduce them accurately on the target partition is through a sector-by-sector copy. If you use this switch to create an image of a dynamic disk, then the image must be restored to a disk with identical geometry.

Symantec Ghost 8.0
Norton Ghost 2003

(those are for the version I have)
 
That switch to make it copy even with bad clusters will come in awfully handy. I never really poked around too much in Ghost....
 
alot of enthusiasts perfer other clone utilities
and if the basics are all you employ I can see that
but when you need something a little unusual thats where Ghost generally has a switch for it
in DOS of course :p I dont like cloning at too high a software level, just another level of something to go wrong, I find DOS no great inconvience

but then for the last several weeks Ive killed my W2K shell so I have to employ the commandline :p
good practice
 
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