data recovery possible?

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s.dot
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data recovery possible?

Post by s.dot »

I needed to reformat my hard drive the other day, so I erased everything with partition magic.. using secure erase. So i'm pretty sure that's all gone.

However, I saved the stuff i needed to my external hard drive. Then I readded it once I reformatted. Then I deleted it off of the external hard drive.

I forgot about a project i've been working on for two months, and deleted that instead of putting it back on my pc =/

Is it possible to recover this data? =/
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Post by Chris Corbyn »

That sucks when that happens :cry:

Yes and no. It's a bit of an expert field. What's the filesystem type? I know with reiser there are tools that can do it but you risk screwing your entire filesystem if even the smallest of changes occurs while you work with it.

If all you've done is a quick delete DO NOT do anything else on that drive yet. The more changes you make on the filesystem, the less likely you are to recover data successfully.

Let us know the FS and I'll have a search for some tips if nothing else. I do remember reading some useful guides for data recovery on reiserfs though :)
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Post by Weirdan »

probably yes, if you didn't write anything to your external hd after the deletion.
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Post by s.dot »

I haven't.
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Post by Weirdan »

So, what kind of FS do you have on your external hd?
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Post by s.dot »

FAT32

I searched downloads.com for data recovery. Downloaded a prog... trying it out now.

If -for some reason- it can't be recovered... I will cry. =[ I hate learning things the hard way!
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Post by Weirdan »

Fat32 should be relatively simple to work with (and there are TONS of utils for it).
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Post by s.dot »

This prog says 3 hours left on the data recovery scan. It's coming up with lots of stuff so this might prove to be a good thing.

Guess I'll let ya guys know in three hours. :cry:

Thanks for the help.
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Post by Ambush Commander »

Hope you find it. Hmm... were you using Subversion?
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Post by s.dot »

Well, it's not on the external drive =/ I remember I did copy a movie over to the hd yesterday, so it probably wrote over it. =/

I did, however, copy it to my main hd before deleting it. So I'll try data recovery on that too.

[edit] This would have to happen today..... can i blame terrorists? :cry:
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Post by feyd »

scottayy wrote:[edit] This would have to happen today..... can i blame terrorists? :cry:
As long as you blame yourself first. :P
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Post by s.dot »

Hmm, after finding the files, they throw in the $79 to save/recover them. =/ I won't have that for a couple weeks. Anyone know of good free utitilies for this?
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Post by RobertGonzalez »

I doubt you will find a good free util. I went through this a few weeks back when my SD card crashed. There are a ton of free products out there that will tell you if your stuff can be recovered. But a lot of them are hooks like what you are experiencing. They tell you they can, but they do not give you the data without paying for it.
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Post by s.dot »

Trying one out called FreeUndelete 2.0 by OfficeRecovery. We'll see how this does. 3 hour scans suck, though. :P I guess it's taking longer cuz the hard drive is external.
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Post by s.dot »

My file looks like this....

Code: Select all

1Q?2tÅÿs~ѺÖuˆüžcœ~ΧôÏ÷†{ʯ½ž+ž¸2ìCÑæ›k>7}s¯ö™»½E 5w†tÁ
:? Does that mean it's been overwritten?
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