Hardrive recovery

[Shirty10]

Hi,

Got a problem.

I'm running XP on an asus mobo. 2400 CPU etc. The problem in the hardrive. I had a friend over to format the 'C drive' for me and what does he do? format the 'D dive' and of course I haven't got a back up.

The drive in question is about 11 gig. I've run it through various recovery packages and have retrieved most of it. However there are a few word documents that have been recovered but are scrambled. Its these in particular that I'm after. I've tried the standard word recovery and repair etc but to no avail. Before I go ahead and payout half my salary to retrieve this info I thought I might try a few things myself but need some more sophisticated word recovery software at least I think thats what i need.

The pages seem to be complete so the recovery software has picked the document up but now to unscramble it.

Any ideas at all or know any sites that might be able to help with this?

Thanks for your help,


Shirty

[threepe]

If the docs are coming back scrambled have you considered different recovery software to have another go at getting the file back?

In addition, are you sure you are getting the correct file, and not some temporary document that was named something similar to what you are really after?

It just seems a shame to have to go into the unscrambling line, as that is more data reconstruction rather than recovery. If you are starting with something scrambled you are not likely to get back absolutely everything that was in the original document in its original format.

Reuva is free and fast
OnTrack EasyRecovery Professional is better, but costly
Get Data Back is also good, two versions one for NTFS, one for FAT.

P.S. good luck, and when you have finished post back here for advice on backup creation if you are not sure how to come up with a good solution. I know that does not help you now, but it will help for the future. There are lots of reasonably priced options <&#163;100 for both software and hardware.

[Shirty10]

Ok, thanks for the advice,

I've just come of the PC after running 'recover my files' for the last 20 hours. It was only three quarters of the way through reading the disc.

I run a preview but from what I could see the docs seems worse than what I got from 'Getdataback'.


Not sure were to invest the money in this. Attempt it myself or get someone else to do it.


Paul

[peterb]

It sounds as if the documents are pretty badly damaged. Part of the problem is that a word document is actually pretty complex internally, and contains its own virtual directory structure (similar oin concept to an outlook .pst file)

You could try looking at the disk with a hex editor such as winhex to see if you can recover any scraps of plain text - tedious, but if the data is irreplaceable, might be an action of last resort.

This might be worth a look

DOC Regenerator - Recover Word documents

But I haven't used it myself, so I can't vouch for its effectiveness.

You could try a professional data recovery firm - but it won't be cheap, although most charge on a results basis - no fix, no fee.


Redacted

[Splash]

GetDataBack for NTFS is a top notch bit of kit and well worth every penny. In my experience if that doesn't pick anything up nothing will.

That said, if all that happened was that the drive got formatted and no data was written to it I'd be very surprised if you were having issues recovering stuff. you didn't install the app to the drive you were trying to recover from did you