aw
quote:
Originally posted by mattisdada
Download a program called R-Studio.
Then you scan that harddrive, you should be able to recover 95%ish of your files 
A program called Active Undelete also works, but its not as good as R-Studio.
Active Undelete is one of those crap programs you'll find by the douzens. They even wont be able to undelete many files on a working hard disk. It only works when you just need to undelete that file which you just have deleted by accident, nothing more.
Recovering 95%? forget it when you've installed Windows...
quote:
Originally posted by wally
guys i have a very serious problem here, recently my hardrive got currupted from recent hardware crash now i didnt know whats going on so i reinstalled windows on the drive to retrieve all my files
very bad idea as you unfortunatly learned the hard way.
When you want to retrieve files from a corrupted hard disk you should never ever reinstall anything on it, even not a small application.
Instead you should have used a startup disk/cd and try to retrieve your files from there. Or even better, if you can, unplug your hard disk and put it into another computer as a second disk and run any recover software from a working and bootable hard disk.
quote:
Originally posted by wally
BUT i did not format the drive as soon as i got windows to work all my files were gone (Smilie) iv basicaly lost all my files ,250 gig worth i ussually do backups but i really didnt have time or the space to do it. now i really need help in retrieving my files
I'm afraid that not much would be able to be retrieved. You've essentially overwritten most of it by reinstalling Windows. Installing Windows on a corrupted hard disk is almost the same as formatting in such cases since it will rebuild everything (assuming it installed properly). Because it needs to rebuild the tables it also doesn't have any notion of where the previous files were. Thus it simply creates new tables and thus would probably overwrite most of your data files.
If you're extremely lucky you would be able to retrieve some things (but certainly not everything) by using some very specialized recovery software.
The first thing to note is that you should not use that hard disk to boot from, instead you should boot from another hard disk, floppy disc or cd... Note: with hard disk I actually mean a partition. So if you had two partitions on that hard disk, you should use the working partition and set that as your boot up drive instead. And only install stuff (like recovery software) on that working partition. The more you touch the corrupted one by writing something to it, the more you will loose.
After installing recovery software, the first thing you could try is to do a scan. But most of the time this wont give you much result since automated scans always depend on master and file location tables (which were most likely corrupted).
You will have far more 'success' by manually investigating the harddisk and manually searching for file data. As soon as you come across some data you reconize you need to find out all the chained sectors which make up that file. The more fragmented the files were, the harder this is to do, and the more chance there is that some segments are lost forever. Also, by manually searching I mean looking at the actual file data, just like you would look at a file with a hex editor. This is not easy if you're not used to it, and it is extremely time consuming (eg: I took me like half a year, off and on, to manually 'scan' one of my corrupted partitions trying to find stuff, and that was just 100GB). Example of how such hex editing looks like in WinHex (it is similar for any decent recovery program though):
here.
When you do find things you reconize and you were able to reconstruct some files, you should save those files to that other partition. After that you can overwrite the bytes occupied by that file on the corrupted partition with some specific byte. In this way you can 'easly' see what parts of the corrupted partition you've already checked. And you would notice when you encounter cross linked files and such.
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And with specialized recovery software I mean stuff like
R-Studio or
WinHex and the likes. Software which is capable of manually reconstructing the internal structures, seeking and scanning stuff deep within the file system, etc without depending on the Master File Tables and/or Allocation Tables. So, I do not mean (crappy) undelete programs which totally depend on the MFT to do their very basic stuff, like there are so many of them.
Such software is never free nor cheap, but sometimes you can use a limited version for a couple of days (however, in those cases they usually do not allow you to restore files or files bigger than a few KB or something). If you find something which is free, I can almost garantuee you that it will not work.
Software like that is stuff like the forensic or pro version of WinHex (best program I know for such stuff, far better than even R-Studio, though it is complicated to use).
In the end, there is no magic program, I'm afraid. So you better try to accept the fact that you've lost most of it, if not everything. I know that's very hard, but that's also realistic (and I can unfortunatly speak out of experience, even with such tools, and even a couple of times as a matter of fact)...
No matter what tools you use, in this case you MUST read the manuals completely and BEFORE doing anything else if you want to properly recover data. This is very very very important as such tools are extremely powerfull and could just as well overwrite data and/or you might miss some vital features, tools and information if you don't know how to use them.
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