How to recover lost data?

Cuddlesworth

Right, I recently helped a friend over the net overclock his pc. Unfortunalty for him he ignored the last few lines of what I told him to do, made his system un-stable and lost most of the data on a 250gig hardrive. This happeded when he ran checkdisk. Does anybody know a way of recovering the data?

liamo

How he should proceed depends on what the problem is.

Is the disk damaged in some way? Does the OS fail to start? Are files missing from the disk? Is the data in its own partition or is there a single large partition? Is this a data-only disk or does the OS reside on it? What is the OS?

My first suggestion, however, would be to not power up the PC if the OS resides on the disk and there is one large partition. Any activity on the disk could reduce the chance of retrieval of the data.

There are a number of utilities for helping to recover data. If the data is very important, there are also a number of companies who will do this - at a price!

Anyway, post a few more details.

Regards,

Liam

Cuddlesworth

Will do, its just a storage drive, appears as empty, data isnt horribly important, just movies, music etc. Stuff that you dont really want to lose.

chern0byl

If a drive is formatted is the data completely gone or like a magnetic strip, is it still burried in there?

christophicus

It is still buried there although it is raedy to be written over so some of it might be gone.

Cuddlesworth

Nothing has been written to the drive.

chern0byl

Thats kinda cool. Is the data still there if the drive was formatted and re-partitoned?
How do you recover that data and how do you completely clean a hard disk?

Cuddlesworth

chern0byl wrote:

Thats kinda cool. Is the data still there if the drive was formatted and re-partitoned?
How do you recover that data and how do you completely clean a hard disk?

Format it more than once, when you format, you just move the data randomly around.

TempestSabre

chern0byl wrote:

... how do you completely clean a hard disk?

Drill holes through it or chop it up.

tech

the same happned me lately, I know have bought 3 x 320 gig SATA Western Digital Hdd and Dell Cerc 1.5 SATA controller now have RAID 5 with 600 gig's of reduancy

TempestSabre

tech wrote:

the same happned me lately, I know have bought 3 x 320 gig SATA Western Digital Hdd and Dell Cerc 1.5 SATA controller now have RAID 5 with 600 gig's of reduancy

Theres a theory that if its not backed up then its not really important.

tech

?

Cuddlesworth

Great, but can anybody recommend a program for file recovery?

TempestSabre

I've only ever used Nortons or free apps off the web.

decob

krazy_8s wrote:

Great, but can anybody recommend a program for file recovery?

GetDataBack