Topic awaiting preservation: Need advice with undeleting after XP death. (Page 1 of 1)

Hi guys,

My friends XP computer died and her father reinstalled windows - but rather oddly reinstalled over the top as opposed to the more sensible reintstalling in parallel. As a result all her files are gone and this is a bad thing as you might appreciate. So is there any undelete software packages that could potentially recover the lost files or some of them? and since her harddrive was huge I guess it has to have some kind of selection thing so only the files she wants are recovered, otherwise if it recovers all files it finds the computer will more than likely get full up and choke.

So what is the deal here? any chances?

SCRWD//MULTIMEDIA PORTAL

I think you'll have to accept defeat on this one - though it is entirely possible to retrieve files that have not been over-written, the very fact that the OS has been re-installed over the top means that most (if not all) the information that previously existed has been over-written. What remains will be unlikely to make much sense.

Even if the data still exists, it is unlikely that it can be re-constituted.

Sorry.

well... I wouldn't be so sure. In theory, windows should've written itself to the place it was installed first. (If the hard drive hasn't been defragmented in the past, at least.)

There are some very powerfull tools out there to recover files from formated/partially overwritten harddisks. And many modern hard disks have way more than the couple of gigabytes windows consumes.
So, I'd give them a try.

How do I recover data from a hard disk? would be a good start.

I must remember to look in the faqs more often lol

Still, if anyone has any good or bad experiences with certain software then I'd appreciate their advice.

SCRWD//MULTIMEDIA PORTAL

Fair enough - you might be able to maually re-constitute various bits of files (more likely if the hard-drive was defragmented regularly), but I still hold that any applications she had will be gone for good and require re-installation.

I'm not to concerned with applications - they can be fixed easy enough - but one off files can't, I know the solution is to back up regularly, but very few do - a computer is huge and in most peoples eyes the computer is the safe place to store their info, why back up? obviously this is the reason, but to me backing up is almost like doing things twice, maybe that's the coder in me, I hate inefficiency, companies should just make better software and computers

Ok, ok, I'm lazy - but who isn't?

I'm thinking for my next desktop that I might get two hard disks and a raid card and then I am safe - well providing the OS system file corruption doesn't get copied to both drives - actually what is the deal with that? does a dual hard disk setup only safeguard dataloss against mechanical failure? coz surely any file system error would be on both drives

Is the key to have your OS and booting stuff on one drive and the rest (files and applications) on another? Or should applicatons and os be on the same disk and files on a disk of their own? or should I just get three disks? or does partitioning help at all?

SCRWD//MULTIMEDIA PORTAL

indeed, raid's only protect against failure of a hard disk drive - it doesn't even protect against a surge in the controller frying all attached drives.

Partitions can help select what to backup, as os and applications is usually restorable within a couple of hours.
But then 'My Documents' also was a huge step in easing the selection of what should be backed up.

Honestly, nothing that you don't carry of to safe location and doesn't have any moving parts in it should be considered 'backup' - duplicate hard drives are optimistic, at best, and user error is often the cause of data loss (then you wish you had backuped onto a write once medium).

Personally, I backup important stuff on CDRs abount once a week - and a full backup of nearly everything except my windows (which just happens to sit on a different partition) every three months, which I then carry to a friend who lives way up in the mountains - if a nuke hits this place, my data will still be likely to exist.

so long,
Tyberius Prime
PS: don't forget to check your backups from time to time for restorability. Nothing sucks more than discovering that your streamer tapes can't be read anymore.
PPS: We had a huge discussion, started by Wes, about backup strategies recently. Have a search for that.

You might want to give PC Inspector File Recovery a try. It is freeware and has worked fairly well for me in the past.

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm