Data Recovery programs?

[highkoo]

*the pc and the boy are both 9, the pc is the slow one

Well, thats the better combo if you get to choose.

Good to hear its not vital stuff, cuz really, recovering stuff is a bummer.
Its always a mysterious and desperate and slow ordeal.

If the drive and pc are ever in disuse, it might just be interesting to see what is found after scanning for a couple days.

Oh and I forgot I did fail once-
A guy gave me a drive that was probably ten years old. He said it was recently his C:...
I couldnt get it to do anything, literally. Just a brick. I tried hotplugging it even. It wouldnt even do the little metallic 'ping' that they do. It might as well have been a hunk of metal with an ide plug on it.

[evermindn]

The last time one of my drive was accidentally formatted I tried all free products to no avail. The only product that was even able to see the partitions on the drive was from the Active@ File Recovery tool at lsoft.net.
http://www.lsoft.net/file_recovery.aspx
I was impressed with the product's ability to work with various kinds of raid drives and GUID Partition Tables. The active@ tools are not a quick fix, as the scanning for possible partition tables takes a long time, but it is capable of finding files after multiple reformatting.

-- I'm not associated with lsoft.net, just a very relieved user of Active@ data recover suite tools

[Kaine]

I'm sure Kaine is a master in the field.

Master? Hardly, just someone who's had enough people come to me asking for help that I've had to take a look.

I know someone who works with someone who does it for a living... that's a man who's brains I'd like to pick one evening!

Ah so Recuva comes from the same stable as CCleaner. Nice.

Aye, I don't think the is anything from those guys that hasn't proved handy at least once!

And thanks for the other links. I've been concentrating on Nmap specifically for penetration testing. Even though it's included in that Backtrack release. One day I'll get round to cracking my neighbours wifi. Not really, just kidding. Nothing could interest me less.

It works a treat, I'd suggest a good aerial or a stack of pringle cans to help improve in the signal pick up (I've been known to mod a wok myself) and ensure a solid connection. I of course have only attempted this with networks I have permission to be on. Honest.

I didn't know it had such great tools for data recovery. I use WinHex when I need such things, but like most other things it doesn't work very well. And as you probably know WinHex is one of the major computer forensic tools available.

Just handy. The are far better out there, but names escape me. We do work for a few firms that supply custom solutions for this sort of software and I played about with the last generation of forensic tools and was impressed, but the ones being rolled out currently are astounding.

The drive still works, its just been formatted 2 or 3 times due to corruption (i think)

As far as having a problem with lost data, that's a good situation to be in. I'm assuming you've done a quick or regular format rather than zero passed the disk?

Quick format kills the file table without touching the data. Regular I think gets a bit deeper but still doesn't overwrite the data. Zero pass writes a bit to every single sector over and over and that's the killer, thankfully it takes hours to do and nobody ever uses it without a serious reason too.

Stick this drive into another machine and run Recuvu on it and back the data up to another drive completely. If you do it to the same one you'll destroy the data before you can recover it.

[Roman Empire]

I'd say that testdisk is definately one to keep in your toolbox.

And another one.. I've had problems with lost files several times the last 5-10 years, and I've learnt that when not being able to recover files with anything of what was mentioned here already, plus more, the best solution was always GetDataBack:

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

For me this is undoubtfully superior to anything else on the market.

[codec_spurt]

Uh uh..

It's all good. Pringles. Mmm...


Thanks for the drive. Arrived in time. impeccable order.

Gotta love Scan Computers:
http://www.scan.co.uk/

Gotta love their advice. Gotta love Audio Pete!




As for Testdisk, yeah, run it off the latest Partition Magic.