Is it possible to Recover Data...

**Aidman** · 24th May 2004

Hi there,

My gf was having problems over the weekend and decided it would be a good idea to use the system restore disk to get her computer working... now the problem with these restore disks is they format the hard drive then install a fresh copy of windows... this is all that has been done with the laptop.

The problem is my gf has a lot of photographs on her computer that she needs, and a few documents here and there - and i was wondering if there was any remote chance that any of these photos & documents can be retreved from the dead?

Thanks

DG

**easy** · 24th May 2004

I recon your best answer is to just go out to the likes of cnet.com and try find a suitable program and see if it'll do it. I'm sure someone on here can tell you for deffinate whether or not it can be done but i cant really see why it cant.

hmm i'll keep trying to think :nowords:

**flipper321** · 24th May 2004

The thing is to do nothing (if possible) with the hard drive as it stands as any booting/writing will reduce the amount of data available to recover.

Ideally you need another PC to mount this hardrive on as a slave and some recovery software installed on that PC - you may get lucky.

Unfortunately as it's a laptop there'll be some work involved in using the hard drive.

Other more technically minded people will be able to add to this.

**Aidman** · 24th May 2004

I've made sure its stayed off until i find out what can be done - i have a laptop to normal ide converter cable so i can use the laptop drive as a slave in a computer

If anything can be saved it'll be brilliant - i'll continue to search...

DG

**Pegasus** · 24th May 2004

Easy Recovery Pro is the software you want.

Install this on to a desktop PC, and then slave the laptop HDD in the desktop PC using the convertor you already have.

**Garngad** · 24th May 2004

Easy Recovery Pro is a good program, but there was a post about a week ago with a very similar problem. Found it, it was by scottio200 in pc software. In that Zalman007 reported he formatted a 160GB HD and recovered everything using File Scavenger. So that must be worth a try also.

Using SEARCH and entering File Scavenger takes you to it.
Good luck.

Regards,
Garngad.

**Aidman** · 24th May 2004

Thanks Pegasus & Garngad - i'll look into both pieces of software and post any news... hopefully it'll go well :o)

DG

**Panda** · 24th May 2004

I've used Restorer2000. It does not write to the original drive, and will show you very quickly what is recoverable. You can download a demo as a quick way of seeing if you have a chance.

Good luck - Panda