recover favourites from factory settings?

zweton · 20-10-2011 08:34PM #1

Guys, i had to do a factory restore on my laptop. Is there any way/program to restore my IE favourites...had a good few on there i could
do with geting back.

Thanks in advance.:)

Fysh · 21-10-2011 01:45PM

It's unlikely - restoring from factory settings usually involves wiping everything on the disk at the time, and in some cases deleting the partitions completely.

You could try using PhotoRec and see if you can recover usable file fragments. However, as the filesystem's been wiped you won't have filenames for anything that can be recovered so you'd have to go through everything manually afterwards to see if you'd recovered them and frankly, it can be a very labour-intensive process.

Capt'n Midnight · 21-10-2011 05:31PM

Favourites implies IE

in windows 7 they are stored as .lnk , even if you hexedit the http:// text inside is in unicode

for future reference other browsers and perhaps? some IE add ons allow you to synch your bookmarks online

22-10-2011 12:32PM

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Favourites implies IE

in windows 7 they are stored as .lnk , even if you hexedit the http:// text inside is in unicode

for future reference other browsers and perhaps? some IE add ons allow you to synch your bookmarks online

Just a slight correction, they're actually .url files. Plain text ANSI.

Capt'n Midnight · 22-10-2011 02:37PM

Karsini wrote: »

Just a slight correction, they're actually .url files. Plain text ANSI.

oops

the first few in the favorites folder were .lnk's

anyway such small files would have been stored in the $mft area

recover favourites from factory settings?

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