Data Recovery
Deddajay
I've been asked to help out an old boy who's been badly advised by Talk
Talk.
He had a problem with his pc, rang the help line and the idiot there
talked him through reinstalling the machine to factory settings from the
recovery partition. Needless to say, all his personal data has now gone,
including all his music he'd transferred from cassette to mp3 and his
photograph collection.
Can any one advise if it's possible to recover his data after a drive
image file has been restored? I'm currently running Restorer Ultimate on
his drive, but it's very slow and nothing's come up yet. Is there
anything better out there?
I've had quite a lot of success with Restorer in the past, but not when
an image file has been put on, so I'm not sure if there would be any
difference from just a failed drive or a window reinstall.
Any advice appreciated as I would like to help the old guy.
Cheers
Deddajay
----
put the big cat. out to reach me.
John Jordan
>
> I'll give you a tiny bit of hope. If the drive image restore did not zero
> blocks that it didn't need to write data too[1] then there is hope.
Pretty likely, simply due to the time it takes to zero a drive. System
Recovery utils don't tend to bother.
> There may be tools that automate this - wait for some more answers...
I had some success with GetDataBack on NTFS in this situation,
particularly with jpg files. If you're lucky there are still some
directory records and it can recover filenames and fragmented files, but
with that sort of damage it's usually down to trawling for anonymous
continguous chunks.
--
John Jordan
Philip Herlihy
"John Jordan" <ju...@jaj22.org.uk> wrote in message
news:KQHyn.25356$c71....@newsfe24.ams2...
Certainly image the disk to prevent further loss. Then try Testdisk and
Photorec (comes with it). I'm not an expert in this (they are expensive!)
but from what you describe I'd try Photorec first, as you're unlikely to
recover a coherent partition, just some random files. You might be lucky
and get some of the photos.
You should feed back to TalkTalk so they can "train" their staff.
Phil, London
Deddajay
> Philip Herlihy<bounc...@you.com>
> wibbled on Sunday 18 April 2010 20:05
>
>
>> Certainly image the disk to prevent further loss. Then try Testdisk and
>> Photorec (comes with it). I'm not an expert in this (they are expensive!)
>> but from what you describe I'd try Photorec first, as you're unlikely to
>> recover a coherent partition, just some random files. You might be lucky
>> and get some of the photos.
>>
>> You should feed back to TalkTalk so they can "train" their staff.
>>
>> Phil, London
>
>
> while (userwhining)
> {
> status=tellusertoreboot();
> if (status == OK) exit(0);
>
> status=tellusertoreinstallOS();
> if (status == OK) exit(0);
> }
>
LOL, yes I will certainly be taking this up with Talk Talk on his behalf.
Cheers for the laugh
Deddajay
Deddajay
Thanks for the suggestion.
The drive was sent to me by post, so is rigged up as an external at the
moment. Currently running Disc Doctors windows data recovery, which is
showing some empty folders, so I'm hopeful I can retrieve something.
I'll give GetDataback a go if that doesn't work.
Cheers
Deddajay
Mad Ad
"Deddajay" <dedd...@bigcat.leonin.co.uk> wrote in message
news:rN2dnd9--9-R4VbW...@giganews.com...
Lets not forget that the guy, old as he might be, should have backed up
things that were important. A few 20 pence dvd-rs would have saved him all
the hassle.
Perhaps you should teach him how to burn a disk?
Rob Morley
"Mad Ad" <~~@...madmail(at)ntlworld(dot)com...@~~> wrote:
> Lets not forget that the guy, old as he might be, should have backed
> up things that were important. A few 20 pence dvd-rs would have saved
> him all the hassle.
>
Might have saved him all the hassle. DVDs aren't a particularly durable
backup medium.
Jaimie Vandenbergh
wrote:
They last for several to many years, and he only needed them two hours
after what should have been the last backup.
Does your preferred backup-to-DVD program not verify the writes?
Perhaps you should change your preference!
Cheers - Jaimie
--
The glass, being topologically equivalent to a finite flat sheet, can be
neither "full" nor "empty" : it may or may not have some beer balanced
on it. - Oldbloke, urs