File Recovery after format and Windows re-install?

[Zucarita9000]

A friend of mine recently re-installed Windows XP on his machine, but he forgot to backup some items beforehand (I know...). So, I immediately told him to stop using the computer until I could find a decent file recovery software and try to recover whatever was possible.

Problem is, I don't know what software to use. Does anyone here has any recommendations?

 

[Russwinters]

R-Studio

 

[Zucarita9000]

That was fast! thanks, I'll check it out.

 

[Russwinters]

NP!

I'm a DR tech, and I find myself using R-studio more then anything for logical recovery.


GetDataBack, UFS Explorer, Winhex are also useful.

 

[RebateMonger]

I'm a DR tech, and I find myself using R-studio more then anything for logical recovery.

GetDataBack, UFS Explorer, Winhex are also useful.

Russwinters, any chance of comments comparing pros/cons of GetDataBack versus R-studio? I have licenses for GDB and D.A.R.T, but haven't used R-studio before.

Thanks,
RebateMonger

 

[Russwinters]

R-Studio has a nice interface, and can even Rebuild RAID configurations (0, 5, JBOD, 0+JBOD)

It also supports NTFS, HFS, FAT, EXT filesystems.



In my experience it is good to have many softwares, as sometimes a different softwares algorithms magically work better for some cases if there are many bad sectors.

 

[bkch0]

As stated, R-studio supports NTFS, HFS+, FAT32, EXT2...
GDB supports only NTFS or FAT32 depending on which version you get.

R-studio raw recovery has almost all the useful file types and can custom add.
while GDB are limited to JPG/DOC/XLS/BMP/AVI/MP3

 

[Old Hippie]

UFS Explorer, Winhex are also useful.

I've never heard of those two.

I'll have to check-um out.

 

[Modelworks]

I use winhex for recovery , but it requires you to understand what you are recovering and how the files system works.

If the data was actually overwritten, then you are not going to get it back with any software.

 

[Old Hippie]

but it requires you to understand what you are recovering and how the files system works.

Leaves me out.

 

[Russwinters]

I use winhex for recovery , but it requires you to understand what you are recovering and how the files system works.

If the data was actually overwritten, then you are not going to get it back with any software.

This



Your main hope is that if you only just reinstalled windows, that you may have only overwritten some files, and not all of your files. So a RAW recovery with R-studio (using the scan option on the drive) May yield you a hefty % of your files in working condition.

It all depends on how much you have loaded on the drive after you reinstalled windows.

 

[nyker96]

this happened to me recently as well, I fooled around with partition editor and cleaned up the whole drive. used this program called Data recovery wizard, and got back my data on that drive with no problem. but it took about 3.5 hrs to scan the entire drive, so be warned.