Recovering formatted hard drive?

[sauluk]

Had to reinstall windows on the other half's laptop, as part of the process it formatted the hard drive and whilst everything was backed up, we now can't find a photo folder which had years and years of photos in it.

Is there any way I can recover the folder, it was on the desktop under the previous install.

[Elliott]

Simple answer yes, i work in a major computer company and the software we use is brill!

You would normal expect to pay around £80 for the job to be completed however it will recover all deleted files as well as the ones your after... I will speak with one of my technical team and get the software name for you.

[Paul the 6th]

Getbackdata ntfs or getbackdata fat I've used in the past, you will more than likely need the ntfs version.

Takes a good few hours to scan the drive for all the files, then you can select which ones to recover & it takes a few more hours to deposit them back into the real world. N.b. you won't be able to recover files from the one drive back onto itself, you'll need an external hard drive to copy them to.

[Paul the 6th]

www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

[sc00by]

Depends on whether it was a full format or a quick format.

The quick format just marks files on the drive as deleted, it doesn't actually erase over the data. In this case it can be recovered.

The full format actually writes over the data

[Sir Trev]

Closing the door after the horse has bolted of course but I would always suggest you backup precious files like photos to an external drive. They're pretty cheap and far safer.

Hope you get your files back.

[sauluk]

Cheers all, helpful as always. I'll grab one of these programs, thankfully it was a quick format so hopefully much of the data won't be overwritten and I'll get them back.

Luckily she printed a load of them out for albums so we have hard copies of most photos but would be annoying to loose the digital copies.

[L3nny]

Have you double checked to make sure there isn't a Windows.old directory anywhere?

[sauluk]

What / where is that?

[L3nny]

windows.old will be on the root of the C: drive normally. If you have formatted it it wont be there, however you normally have to ask windows to format the drive when installing a new OS.

This is for Vista but is the same on win 7

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/933168

[L3nny]

Ignore that, you don't want to restore windows do you? So just have a root around in that directory (if it exists) you should see a users folder and the photos could be in there.

[sauluk]

How do I root around a .old file? Haven't checked yet but I used quick format from a reinstall so sounds although it should be there

[L3nny]

Its a directory, not a file. Go to My Computer > C: and see if it's there.

If you definitely formatted the had drive then it wont be. But it's worth checking just in case you didn't.

[TheOnlyNemesis]

Another good program that is easy to use is NTFS Undelete