HDD recovery advise

[JONNYG]

Can anyone recommend software to recover info/photo's from a hdd? Yesterday after i'd had couple of beers the Father Inlaw decided it would a good time to give me a dell laptop to look at, he told me the kids had been messing with it and it no longer booted into windows (just a flashing curser in top left corner) so he had taken it to a local computer shop to be repaired where they had told him the hdd was broken and it needed replacing...
I had a copy of hirens boot cd in the car so the geek inside me couldn't resist a quick look. So half cut and several kids racing round I was able to view the partitions on the hdd and there was one listed as recovery (E) which had what looked like all the windows files to bring it back to its original state and there was a larger partition (C) which was unreadable and a couple of smaller partitions. I decided it would be best to leave it and get a bit of advise before pressing any more buttons and the fact i was starting to get funny looks off the other half

Can anyone advise to what I would need to do to recover anything off C?

[WotTheFook]

I would use a program such as Easus File Recovery, Kroll Ontrack Easy Recovery Pro or GetDataBack to scan the drive. GetDataBack comes in FAT and NTFS flavours, so make sure if you use that program you have the right version to match the partition's file system.

All of these programs recover data to another hard drive, so you will need to put the laptop's hard drive into an external caddy if you want to recover files to your PC or another drive.

[evilsatan]

Photorec and testdisk are my favourite two, they recovered stuff that getdataback couldn't save. They are free tools and should be on the Gparted boot cd.

[mr_fuse]

Yeah I can also recommend GetDataBack its got me out of a few issues in the past

[sinister_monk]

another vote for testdisk, its helped me out a few times

[{{909}}]

wifes external fucked up last month and testdisk got all the data off it perfectly (around 200gig), I tried a few other apps but either couldn't find a 'cheap' version, they didnt work or I couldn't figure it out.

[JONNYG]

Many thanks for all the replies, i've downloaded the latest Hirens bootcd which has both testdisk and photorec on so i will have a go with these first and see how i do...
Thanks chaps, I will elt u know how a get on

[JONNYG]

Finally got round to recovering the HDD with photorec but didn't expect it to take this long....
Ive installed photorec on my Acer Revo where the recovered files are being saved to and have the HDD in a docking station connected via USB.
It's been running for 21 hours and seems to be recovering everything on the HDD but it is saying that there is still 100 hours left before its done?
Just wondering if this is normal for a 250gb HDD or have I clicked on something I shouldn't have?

[liveseytowers]

Remember Revo is very low powered, that could be why it's taking ages?

[evilsatan]

It takes ages but does a good job. There is a script you can download which will then sort the recovered files into folders sorted by file type. It sounds like you didn't manually select which files to backup.

[JONNYG]

It takes ages but does a good job. There is a script you can download which will then sort the recovered files into folders sorted by file type. It sounds like you didn't manually select which files to backup.

Yep, I didn't select what files I wanted to backup and asked it to recover the whole HDD just to make sure I got everything, I didn't think it would take the best part of 6 days or i would have gone for just the pictures
I might restart the recovery and manually select just .JPG.
Just looking at builtBackwards now evilsatan, I'm glad you put me onto that m8 as I didn't fancy rooting through all those recup folders, theirs like over 2400 folders which will probably more like 15000 by the end of play. Lol

Cheers

[evilsatan]

No worries, great bit of software for jobs like this but does take ages and you will have a job sorting through even when in folders by file extension as it will backup images from program files etc.