Hardrive totally wiped

angeleyes

Ok its official

Dell wiped the hardrive on my laptop - and they keep telling me that they advised me that this would happen but they didn't as if I had known I would have taken out the hard drive and let the laptop off without the hard drive. I also got onto PC World and a very smug lady told me data gone can't be retrieved.

I was told by other boardies here last night that this was worth using

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

Just wondering if anyone else has used this and how successful you were with getting stuff back.

Lazarus2.0

Have used Recuva a number of times with varying degrees of success (mostly good). It's important to stop using the drive immediately as any further writing to disk will possibly overwrite files you may wish to recover . How the disk was wiped will also have a bearing on your chances but not much you can do about that at this point .

You'll want to recover the files to another hard drive so either instal the HD as a slave on another PC or pop it into an external caddy - ensure the machine you are recovering to has enough free space .

angeleyes

nessyguin wrote: »

Have used Recuva a number of times with varying degrees of success (mostly good). It's important to stop using the drive immediately as any further writing to disk will possibly overwrite files you may wish to recover . How the disk was wiped will also have a bearing on your chances but not much you can do about that at this point .

You'll want to recover the files to another hard drive so either instal the HD as a slave on another PC or pop it into an external caddy - ensure the machine you are recovering to has enough free space .

Thanks for that nessyguin - am going to try it later on this afternoon. Good tip about the external hard drive as well.

darraghking22

how was the drive wiped?

if it was just reformatted you're ok, but if there has been anything written to the disc after info was deleted i think you're outta luck

when you delete stuff from your hard drive you basically tell the computer that ext time it wants to save a file, it can save over that position/file on the hard drive.

unless you do a double pass format, which marks the area as free and then writes blank data to that position ensuring nothing can be retreaved.

so if you got a blank drive back with nothing on it(no OS or anything, i mean completely blank) then id be confident in saying you could get all your info back

meglome

Just as a general point never hand a phone or laptop to the likes of Dell without backing it up first. One of the most common things they will do is wipe the drive and bye bye data. Of course if you can't access the drive that presents you with a big problem, which is why backups are important.

A friend of mine had his laptop stolen with all his info, family photo's etc. etc. on it... no backups... all gone never to be seen again.

I've used recuva and it seemed pretty good.

DeepBlue

I've used GetDataBack for NTFS in the past with very good results. Although in my case the partition table was borked but it recovered all my files.

GetDataBack will recover your data if the hard drive's partition table, boot record, FAT/MFT or root directory are lost or damaged, data was lost due to a virus attack, the drive was formatted, fdisk has been run, a power failure has caused a system crash, files were lost due to a software failure, files were accidentally deleted. GetDataBack can even recover your data when the drive is no longer recognized by Windows. It can likewise be used even if all directory information - not just the root directory- is missing.

It does however cost money although *cough* you might be able to "acquire" a copy.