Is there a way to recover the data that has been wiped by accident? Because I need to find the data that is important to my customer/friend.. I have no idea on which program to look for to recover vital data. I didn't wipe the drive, my customer/friend did. And from the looks of it, it looks like it has been restored back to factory.. Are they out of luck recovering the data??
If it has been restored already, there's a chance that the data has already been overwritten so it's lost forever. I wouldn't know about programs to recover them but I'm sure a creative Google search will yield all the answers you need.
I remember a guy in work used this once to restore a whole partition after he screwed his HDD: http://www.easeus.com/ have a look with the free version and see if anything is recoverable.
Ok, Thanks Deathtaker27. Will try that now. Hopefully it's recoverable... I think they backed up their data but I'm not sure if they did that. I'll check on this drive though.. Is there an certain limit on the Free version of EaseUS?
There are various linux live boot cd you could try. I've had a few too many beers tonight and forget the one I'm thinking of. But see if any will pull data. If it was a quick format you might be lucky. If it was a full format you're S.O.L. AFAIK
I just used the EaseUS program that Death recommended.. found 263 files so far.. Hopefully it's still there..
It's still hunting down on the drive as of 4:23 PM Pacific Canadian Time. got like 130K files.. They had this laptop for 3 to 4 (I think) years so there's a lot of files to sort through.. Is there a quicker way to sort these?? I am still using EaseUS Data Recovery Free Edition.
Ok It's done scanning.. Now it's putting together a directory.. It's gonna take a while for this, I assume. Total numbers of found files: 1280527. Holy crud. Ok, it seems that the restore to factory pretty much destroyed all the data that was on there.. I think they got the files off there prior to me having this laptop. I am creating a System Image on the laptop right now as we speak so this way if it breaks again, I'll have the image handy for them. This is why Backups are so important! I'll remind them to backup every month if possible..
