computer crashed can we retrieve emails
Surreal
to rebuild lost everything. Is there any way to recover lost files , emails
etc from outlook express once the computer has been restored back to factory
settings?
Steve Cochran
steve
"Surreal" <Sur...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message news:2B75669D-D9AF-45C3...@microsoft.com...
VanguardLH
Obviously when you restore an image into a partition then everything in
that partition is lost. Did you expect you data to survive an image
restore or fresh install of the OS? You screwed over your friend's host
by not saving his files before wiping out the partition with a backup
image or with a fresh OS install. Hope your friendship can survive you
blowing away your friend's data. While it's possible to recover lost
files (those found in unallocated sectors), you better figure out what
story you're going to tell your friend when you cannot recover their
data files (in this case, the .dbx files for Outlook Express).
Since you overwrote the partition to replace the OS with an image, it is
highly unlikely that any of the .dbx files can be recovered from that
partition. By restoring the recovery image, you wiped out any files
that were on the hard disk before except for those files that would be
outside the footprint of the image (i.e., were allocated sectors that
aren't used by the restored image). The more you use the hard disk the
less chance that you'll be able to recover the lost files. A Google
search will turn up lots of utilities that try to search through
unallocated sectors for files, like Piriform's Recuva (there are
probably better file recovery tools but this is one of the free ones).
http://www.google.com/search?q=%2Brecover+%2B%22lost+file%22
Considering that it appears you are not a professional data recovery
expert, you'll probably want to add "+free" to the search criteria.
Usually you recover the lost files in pieces and have to figure out how
to put them back together or determine what pieces were lost; however,
.dbx files for OE are databases and cannot withstand segmentation or
loss. You need to recover the entire .dbx file. Installing the
recovery software on the hard disk from which you trying to recover the
lost files will also overwrite more sectors on your hard disk and
decrease your chances of recovering the lost files. Normally you make
the problematic hard disk the slave drive (in the current host or in
another host) and only read from that hard disk. Writing to a hard disk
means wiping out the files that are already there, and restoring a
recovery image or doing a fresh install of the OS overwrites so many
sectors that chances of recovering lost files becomes minimal and likely
to be segmented (you only recover some parts of the lost file).
So where are the backups that this user should've been saving
periodically? If you don't backup then you deem your data as worthless
or reproducible. When you get that momentary deer-caught-in-headlights
stare from the user when you ask about backups, you already know they
don't have any. Obviously when you ask your friend if he saved backups
that he will know you screwed up. Next time just tell your friend that
you don't have the expertise to repair his computer.
@nomail.afraid.org FromTheRafters
news:2B75669D-D9AF-45C3...@microsoft.com...
No. There is an off chance to recover *some* data that the restore
process didn't overwrite, but then you're left with a complicated puzzle
to piece together (OE's dbx file format remnants).
Even if you intended to perform a "reinstallation" of the OS (over the
top, leaving user data alone), it would have been a good idea to make a
backup of *everything* first (even if your friend was diligent enough to
have been backing up all along - which he or she probably wasn't).
johnchri...@gmail.com
Utilize http://www.readingdbxfiles.oemailrecovery.com