Data recovery from formatted partition - any way to do this?

[stavroshamster]

Okay - my wife has had 3 weeks of work lost from her computer by her work IT support guy who didn't check it was okay to format her hard drive and install Windows 7 (from XP).

Is there any way in which this can be recovered, either by software available online, or taking it to a data recovery firm? Or is it going to be lost for ever?

Thanks guys!

[mrt9888]

As data has been written to the drive after the drive was formatted you won't be able to recover all the data. For software you could try using recuva, make sure you don't write to the drive before getting the data of it this includes using Windows.

[Splash]

You're likely boned, you may be able to recover *some* data but as has been pointed out any area of disk that has been written to will have overwritten any data on the disk.

That said... why did your wife have data stored on her client, rather than on a fileserver?


Finally... if you want, I can take a peek and see what I can do - I think I'm over your side of town and I'm kicking my heels on leave this week. Drop me a line if you want me to take a look.

[watercooled]

Photorec is good at recovering files, even from deleted partitions but as above, recovery is VERY unlikely if Windows has been installed over it.
Morale of the story: you MUST BACK UP any data even remotely important to you. If you can't take out the HDD of your computer and smash it to bits right now without losing anything important, your backup strategy isn't good enough.

[stavroshamster]

You're likely boned, you may be able to recover *some* data but as has been pointed out any area of disk that has been written to will have overwritten any data on the disk.

That said... why did your wife have data stored on her client, rather than on a fileserver?


Finally... if you want, I can take a peek and see what I can do - I think I'm over your side of town and I'm kicking my heels on leave this week. Drop me a line if you want me to take a look.

She's left it for today and is going to try and get the IT man to try and sort it tomorrow, although as you say it's unlikely much is left - thanks for the offer of help though - much appreciated.

To answer the question about why it hadn't been backed up - basically the NAS storage has been buggered in the last couple of weeks so there was no access, she had backed up some stuff on an external hard drive but hadn't recently - and the IT man couldn't get through on her phone today to ask her whether it was okay to wipe the disk, but did it anyway.

[snootyjim]

I've tried exactly this before, resulted in complete and total failure.

I didn't restore one single file from the hard disk.

[snootyjim]

the IT man couldn't get through on her phone today to ask her whether it was okay to wipe the disk, but did it anyway.

And he's a clot.

[watercooled]

And he's a clot.

Yeah, but any backup strategy should allow for your HDD to fail at any time without losing much, say a day or even less if you do a lot of work. Not that I'm saying it's OK for him to do it, but stuff like this does tend to happen when you're without backup for a while thinking 'it will be OK for now'. If you lose a NAS, you need to backup to another medium, or online, as regularly as you were before. I've been giving Dropbox a try and can recommend it, it's not strictly an online backup service but it gives you a folder on your PC which is synced with their servers and even stuff you delete is kept for a month before being removed from their servers.

[dirky]

I've used getdataback before, although not after being formatted&reinstalled. good luck fella!

[duc]

You probably won't be able to recover all the files, but, you'll stand a better chance of getting some if the file sizes are small and the hard drive large; more space for them to swim around in. Make sure that IT man didn't run defragment after installation.

[oolon]

Have a look at the Disk Internals products, you can try before you buy. If you have not all ready stop using the computer now, every moment you use it more it is more likely you will get nothing back. The NTFS recovery tool, can scan the disk to look for "lost" directories, hopefully the files will be in there, if she had the laptop filled up it is more likely you will find something, as less off the disk percentage wise will have been overwritten.

[Akira]

We've had some success at recovering from damaged partitions with this:

http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/