Help!!!

[Blogwitch]

A couple of days ago, I had a major happening.

Through a stupid fault of my own trying to work while tired, I lost 500MB of data on a hard drive by formatting the wrong drive. Not any old data, but all my model engineering related work and emails and favourites from about the last ten years, in fact data that I use and share daily. I am about to use some high end software to see if I can recover some of it, but in the meantime, I hope a few of you can help.

Over the years, I have sent out small packages to people, and I would like, if at all possible, for those people to contact me through PM (as I said, all my email contact lists has gone) so that maybe I can get back a little of the data that I sent out.

Many thanks

John

 

[dalem9]

Sorry John if you reformatted it the data is probley gone.Dale

 

[stevehuckss396]

We have never exchanged any data but if you think of anything specific and I have it, I'll certainly send it over.

 

[tattoomike68]

http://z-a-recovery.com/

The free version works great

 

[doc1955]

Even if you formatted drive if you don't write to it you should be able to recover all your data just don't write to the drive before you use a recovery program to recover it.
You could try one of these Portable programs I have one on a jump drive not sure which one but it works like a charm as long as you have not writen over the data you want to recover.

 

[ttrikalin]

wot doc said.

If you do not want to do it yourself, inquire also on data recovery services in your country. Ask around and be prepared to wait it out a bit.

When I was inquiring for a similar issue (disk head crash) I got prices that differed by 10 fold.

Many came back to me with counter offers couple of weeks later.

take care,
tom in MA

 

[steamer]

Good advice here Bogs...take heart, all may not be lost!

Dave

 

[Troutsqueezer]

Seems to be a number of programs that will recover data from reformatted drives. Just Google it. Here's an example: http://www.easeus.com/landing/format-recovery.htm?gclid=CP6p1_jG4qwCFYUbQgodzzFrnA

 

[Sshire]

Bogs
Hands down , Steve Gibson knows more about disk recovery than anyone. After teaching Digital Imaging for more than 20 years, I can attest to the fact that students can bolix up a hard driven and lose files in unimaginable ways. Gibson Research "Spinrite" software rarely failed in the recovery. Steve is THE expert in this field.
Link to Spinrite is here

http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

Best
Stan

 

[Maryak]

John,

I am sorry to read about your mishap. If this data is valuable to you then I recommend let the pros do it. They can recover down to a depth on the drive that is beyond anything an amateur can achieve. This is especially true if you have written anything to the drive since the mishap.

Hope this helps.

Best Regards
Bob

 

[Ken I]

John, as per the advice above - it should be recoverable - as long as you don't rewrite anything to the disk.

A computer magazine in a demonstration of the powers of recovery, formatted a drive, placed it in a dish - poured a cup of petrol over it - set it on fire - let the flames burn out - placed it in a bucket of water for 24 hours.

And then recovered ALL the data.

The company that did the recovery also commented that if you dispose of a hard drive containing sensetive data you should completely destroy it as the only safe way of ensuring that the data is not recoverable.

What they actually said was "remove the disk, sand off the surface and crush the disk to powder".

It was also reported that the CIA and FBI have recovered data from disks that had been "wiped" over by using scanning tunneling electron microscopes to read the "history" by small offsets between writes - but I suspect this might just be urban legend (but they have recovered wiped data).

My point is - take heart your data is probably recoverable.

Ken

 

[SBWHART]

John

I have lots and lots of files that you have shared with me I can bring my lap top round latter to day and can copy them over.

Stew

 

[Blogwitch]

Many thanks gents for all your offers of help. It looks like I won't be needing it after all.

Stew came around at lunchtime, just as the recovery program had finished scanning, with good results, so two things to make me smile, data recovered, and I managed to get my greasy claws on Stews Popcorn engine, a real stunner when seen in the flesh.

Just what I needed, a good cheering up.

John

 

[tattoomike68]

Many thanks gents for all your offers of help. It looks like I won't be needing it after all.

Stew came around at lunchtime, just as the recovery program had finished scanning, with good results, so two things to make me smile, data recovered, and I managed to get my greasy claws on Stews Popcorn engine, a real stunner when seen in the flesh.

Just what I needed, a good cheering up.

John

What recovery program?

oK I see it on the other thread.

 

[Chazz]

My day job is a computer tech and I end up constantly telling people BACK UP YOUR DATA! It is the single most important item in your system. Usually I recommend a USB external drive and an idiot proof backup program like Acronis.

The 'In House' recovery software we use is called 'Get Data Back' and has worked quite well for us.

I am glad you were able to get your data back, we had a single mother come into our shop who accidentally reformatted her HDD (kinda like what Bogs did) and it was the only copy of 2+ years worth of her kids photos! No backup! A call to a data recovery company quoted +$2,000.00 for data recovery services, we ran the above recovery program, took an entire weekend but we got her pictures back.

Anyway, all is well that ends well, eh?
Chazz