Recovery: experts needed

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my Hard disk was of 4 Partitions..

1-C Win7 2-Soft my progs 3-Media (movies,songs and what ever) 4-Personal (My life time Work and Experience) !!

Bad Sectors or what ever caused some problems,

so i sent it to be Fixed BUT they just Formatted it after Backup 3 Partitions only (Win7 , Soft and Media) the most important partition wasn’t included !!

then They formatted the whole Hard Disk ..

and repartitioned it into 2 partitions only

the partition that was lost Contained my Most Precious Files of all time :'(

i need any help how to recover these files or what is the right way to do it??

this is 320GB HDD in Laptop HP Pavilion DV3 2165ee

Thanks in advance . waiting for any help !!

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For something this valuable, sometimes it’s better left up to a professional. Check your local area .

Professional grade hard drive recovery

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That is super serious stuff, might not even be possible. Along the lines of Clint’s thinking, I would contact MyHardDriveDied.com. Scott Moulton is the recovery genius; send him an email outlining the same history of circumstances that happened and see what he thinks your chances are. If he thinks it’s possible I wouldn’t hesitate to send it off to him if the data really is invaluable to you. It’ll cost between $750 and a Grand most likely but may be worth it.

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It wouldn’t hurt to give Recuva a shot at it. http://www.piriform.com/recuva

Jerry

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I wouldn’t touch or use the drive at all, especially if your a novice. Take it too a professional and fork out the bucks if that’s what it takes.

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For something this valuable, sometimes it’s better left up to a professional. Check your local area .

Professional grade hard drive recovery

those profs Caused this problem

That is super serious stuff, might not even be possible. Along the lines of Clint’s thinking, I would contact MyHardDriveDied.com. Scott Moulton is the recovery genius; send him an email outlining the same history of circumstances that happened and see what he thinks your chances are. If he thinks it’s possible I wouldn’t hesitate to send it off to him if the data really is invaluable to you. It’ll cost between $750 and a Grand most likely but may be worth it.

i’m from Egypt

It wouldn’t hurt to give Recuva a shot at it. http://www.piriform.com/recuva

Jerry

i did give it a shot and others lots but they keep scanning the present partitions not the Removed ones !!

I wouldn’t touch or use the drive at all, especially if your a novice. Take it too a professional and fork out the bucks if that’s what it takes.

i’m Using it right now on my laptop, Unfortunately there’s no Profs around

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I gather that the 2nd and 3rd partitions where merged as one?
Do you know how the formatting was done; Full vs Quick?

Now for the million dollar question:
Did you make a drive image prior to sending the laptop in?

If you’ve already got software attempting to recover data, leave it alone until it finishes.
It needs to scan the partition your OS is NOT on.
The file recovery application should be sending the restored files, if any, to an external drive plugged into the laptop.
It’s very highly unlikely that you’ll be able to recover the partition intact. the best you can hope
for will be to recovers some of your files.

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dr. vista, i am not quite as negative about your chances. i have been amazed at what was possible with good recovery software.

years ago while rebuilding a couple pc’s i ran out of space to move some photos, so i tempoarily moved some to a different drive. eventually i got confused in moving files and swapping drives and ended up formatting and reinstalling windows on one drive where i had placed my only copies of some family photos. when i discovered my mistake i was livid!

i started an internet search for recovery software and found easeus data recovery wizard. i downloaded and scanned it for nasty and then fired it up. it slowly started to scan the drive so i went to bed. in the morning i was amazed to see the big list of photos it had found!

the free version would scan and show a list but not recover the files. i quickly laid out my $100 for the full version and successfully recovered _all_ my photos.

since then i have bought other tools from easeus and have always been pleased.

your mileage may differ,
-perhaps i was lucky that the new os install did not overwrite my photos
-i don’t recall if i changed the partitions or just reformatted my drive

Good Luck!
brino

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…a couple more things….

-make sure you write _nothing_ to the drive
-since this is a laptop, and one of your original partitions was the OS then this is likely, the _only_ drive; that’s a problem…any tools you install on it for hard-drive recovery will overwrite more of the stuff you want to recover! even using windows will write files (restore points, temp files, swap space, recycle bin, etc.)
-you should add this drive to another machine a a secondary drive for recovery
-first step make a full 1:1 image backup; not just a file backup, but unused space too!
-you might want to check with the recovery company that you used, a good one should make images of all incoming drives and maybe they still have yours
-a local PC professional here uses GetDataBack, I have never used it

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Thanks for all

i really appreciate your help

my last hope would be Using my HDD as Secondary Drive on another PC .. Cuz i tried another Software Called 1st NTFS Recovery but found That at Certain point it Causes a System Crash and begets Blue Screen

Thanks again for Your help .. Wish me Luck

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those profs Caused this problem

You need to find someone who specializes in data recovery. There are probably lots of general-purpose techs who aren’t specialists in data recovery, or who aren’t even advanced technicians.

Did you let them know that the contents of your drive needed to be preserved? If you told them that, then any tech who was any good would have either done a complete backup or would not have taken the job.

Having said all that, I wish you well in your efforts to recover the data. The problem is, however, that when data integrity is compromised in any way, you have to be very careful lest you do something that makes data recovery impossible. That’s why, if you aren’t fairly well skilled at that sort of thing, it would be better to find someone who is.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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You need to find someone who specializes in data recovery. There are probably lots of general-purpose techs who aren’t specialists in data recovery, or who aren’t even advanced technicians.

Did you let them know that the contents of your drive needed to be preserved? If you told them that, then any tech who was any good would have either done a complete backup or would not have taken the job.

Having said all that, I wish you well in your efforts to recover the data. The problem is, however, that when data integrity is compromised in any way, you have to be very careful lest you do something that makes data recovery impossible. That’s why, if you aren’t fairly well skilled at that sort of thing, it would be better to find someone who is.

i did told him that Data is VERY important to me !!

he Just said that the Last partition couldn’t be opened it was Asking to be Formatted, so he just did Format it

i do have some experience with data Recovery .. i’m just waiting to find another proper PC to Use my HDD on it and try .

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dr vista, do please let us know how you make out.
wishing you the best of luck!
brino

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If the so call expert was unable to open the partition and did not know how to save any data from it he should have left it alone (not formatted it) then you may have been able to try someone else more skilled in data recovery.

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The key here is to find someone who (1) knows what they are doing, and (2) is extremely careful in what they do. If all you could find was someone who was very careful, then you would at least have someone who wouldn’t venture into an area where he didn’t know what he was doing.

It sounds to me like you found someone who kindof knew what he was doing, but he wasn’t a very careful person, and so he ventured off into the unknown, hoping for the best. Not the kind of person you want doing data recovery for you, because data recovery requires extreme care in order to avoid messing up your data.

You need someone who is paranoid like me, because I won’t touch it unless I know exactly what I am doing.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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IF you have access to another machine:

search on “testdisk” or go to http://www.cgsecurity.org/

You’ll need to use a live CD or bootable thumb drive – there are several images you can use, for instance GParted Live CD or Hiren’s Boot CD, or a live FreeDOS CD.

Read and follow directions most carefully. Take as much time as you need to understand what you will be doing, print out directions, etc. I suggest starting with testdisk to see if it can find the filenames of the files you’d like to recover.

Partitions are not at issue, presuming that the current two partitions encompass the entire drive. That it originally was set up by you with four partitions doesn’t matter; it’s the files you’re after (the old partitions are gone); the files are still on the physical media right where you left them. (Obviously, some may have been overwritten since then.) The problem is that with re-formatting, the new Master File Table has no knowledge of them and so cannot point to them.

If testdisk can find the files, great! Otherwise, you’ll be in for a long slog using photorec – but if anything can recover the files, it can.

These programs have let me fix and recover partitions and files a half-dozen times.

I wish you the very best of luck.

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YOUR PROFESSIONAL EXPERT WAS ACTUALLY A CLUELESS CARELESS CLOT.

The first item on this page is a 20 MB download of Freeware “Lazesoft Recovery Suite”
http://www.lazesoft.com/download.html

This has successfully recovered 418 GB of files from the unallocated space that was once a 500 GB partition on my 600 GB Secondary HDD.
It was also prepared to recover NTFS files from region that Windows said was RAW (i.e. no longer seen by Windows as even being NTFS format)
Please note that this utility does NOT write to the disk – so long as you choose a different disk for saving the files to.

Unfortunately every day that you are using Windows 7 it is likely to update (i.e. delete and re-write) from 100 MB to 1 GB per day,
and small fraction of that may be over-writing and utterly destroying any files that you may wish to recovery from the region covered by partition C:.
Hopefully your highly valued files will be remote from partition C:

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Hello Dr Vista,

If I were you, I would be telling this incompetent person that they ought to be paying for their mistake, for not consulting you first, and before they just formatted the Drive without informing you of the possible consequences.
There are too many wannabes that think that they know all about such matters, when they don’t! :angry:
I have a motto that this person should adhere to…”If it works, Don’t Fix it!”.

Good luck with the data recovery.

Kind Regards,

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I highly recommend James at http://fixit.litten.com/ for recovery help. He has help me recover a corrupted hdd and a failing drive that was reformatted in error by Windows. He only charges if successful and will walk you through the process step by step. Feel free to use my name.

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Formatting any of the OTHER partitions on your disk may not have caused any serious damage: even a non-‘Quick’ format normally only read-scans the sectors in the partition for errors rather than writes to them, so while the high-level file system data in the formatted partitions may have been reinitialized the file system data in the partition you completely lost should have been left untouched as long as none of the operations performed on the other partitions actually over-wrote it.

I’m not sure how to interpret your statement that the entire disk was formatted, though. My guess would be that the yoyo who was working on it probably just deleted the partitions on it, which, again, would likely not have affected anything in the partition that you’re looking for.

Before doing anything you should have made a byte-for-byte image (NOT the normal kind of image created by common partition-imaging programs) of your entire disk – but doing so now will at least preserve whatever may be left on it so that you can recover it.

Then, you could use software such as TestDisk – http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk – to scan your disk for any partitions it can find there. If the partition you’re looking for was the last one on the disk you’re more likely to be able to find it and recover data from it, since data from the other partitions will likely not have been placed that far on the disk.

But if you’re more comfortable with a GUI program, you could try Easeus Partition Manager’s Partition Recovery Wizard, which will do something similar (again, after you’ve created the byte-for-byte image of the disk) if you first delete all (or at least the last) partitions on the disk (since the Wizard will only search unallocated space on the disk for lost partitions). Either way, you may have to guess among the possible partition start locations found if you don’t happen to know approximately where your lost partition started on the disk.

(Those are just two possible programs out of many that might do the job, by the way: you might want to look around for others.)

If you’re lucky, you’ll find your lost partition in good enough shape to be reconstituted and to recover your data from. If not, then there may be little you can do yourself to recover it (and there may not be much that ANYONE short of the NSA can do if your important files have actually been over-written; even if they haven’t been over-written themselves, if the file-system data describing them has been over-written the pieces of any files that were not contiguous on the disk may be very difficult to reconstruct, even by a professional, and merely identifying the start and end points of contiguous files may not be within the scope of easily-available consumer software, though given sufficient patience you could likely recover data from simple text files by scanning the relevant portion of the disk for text data that you recognized – with some thought you could probably find a way to automate this process at least to some degree, e.g., by creating a large file using a program that would treat all non-text data as blanks to make it easy to scan).

Good luck – you may need it.

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I’ve done a lot of data recovery over the years, usually with dying drives… but it sounds like the first piece that needs extra emphasis is that you need to shut down that computer and disconnect the hard drive YESTERDAY. Formatting and re-partitioning do their damage, and decrease the chances of recovery, but your biggest enemy is anything writing to the drive. Windows is always writing to the drive when it runs, and if it has overwritten an important sector even once, the odds are that NO ONE can recover it (and that includes the manufacturers like Seagate and the specialists who claim they can recover data from hard drives at the bottom of the lake). It sounds, though, like the part of the hard drive in question might not have been written to (very much), so I would think you still have good chances of recovering data. I have used GetDataBack (for you the NTFS version) with success most of the time, plus it allows you to image a drive, so if the drive is dying, you have a better chance of recovery before it goes… In one case, where I recovered no directory structures and found only lost files, I found NTFS Undelete was more effective at identifying Office and other files. I haven’t used it enough yet to know if it is overall a better tool, but I would recommend it if you have a lot of Office files. Both of these programs require payment for them to do the whole job.

There is no harm in doing the work yourself, as long as you avoid writing to the drive (my preference would be connecting it to an XP machine), and if the drive is healthy otherwise, you could try one tool after another. However, once you start purchasing programs, you might want to ask yourself if you want to do this often, or if this is a one-shot deal. It could quickly become more economical to take the drive to someone who already has the multiple programs in hand.

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