Help Me! Your mission should you choose to.....

[rivercom9]

HELP!!! My friend deleted data from his hard drive. The data is very important. Its a matter or life and death. (Maybe not life and death, but it seems that way.) He deleted scanned photos of very important receipts that he needs in order to get his money back (Somewhere in the neighborhood or about a $1K) cause he got scammed and needs those receipts in order to get him money back. Is there any way to get data back that was deleted through Win 98 in the Recycle Bin? Please help! You guys are our only hope! If can't do it, no one else can!

[The Doors]

Hi rivercom9, welcome to the Forum,
You can try using Norton Unerase.

my 0.02 cents

[Burning Phoenix]

try this click here (http://www.filerecover.com/)

[Shadow ÒÓ]

did he already empty the recycle bin?

if so...it ain't gonna be easy, and you'll have to install software on that drive (which may over wright the info you are trying to recover) unless you can take the drive and put it in another machine. Look for a program called Undelete.

[KeyboardCowboy]

get a program called norton unerase, trust me, it works

[Mictlan]

The one and most important thing, if you want to recover the information is : DO NOT WRITE ANYTHING IN THE HARD DRIVE. If you write anything (even the Internet cache) you could possible write over the information you are trying to restore. Shut down the machine and get another drive with NOrton Unerase or Undelete an recover your information.

Until you actually write something over the same space, the information remains in your HD. Erasing only changes a write here signal in the FAT of the media.

[rivercom9]

Thanks for all the replies. I need all the input I can get.

[Garfield]

I didn't know that you could get deleted data back (not even from the Recycling bin). How is that possible? What exactly happens when you delete a file? I though it was...deleted. Can somebody explain this enigma?

--Garfield

[Shadow ÒÓ]

if you simply delete an item, it goes to the recycle bin. Double click your recycle bin, and you'll see all the garbage you've deleted. (if you've never emptied it) Surprisingly, a lot of people don't know about the process of emptying it (simply right click it, and choose empty) and complain when their hard drives are full or running slow. If you DO have files in there, simply right click the ones you want to save, and select restore)

Now...if you delete something, it doesn't actually zero that area of your drive out, it tells Windows (or your OS of choice) that the space is now available to write to, or it's blank. It's not. It's still there, but with no "bookmarks" so to speak, so the OS doesn't recognize it as actually being there. Programs like undelete find the "bookmarks" and put them back in place to keep Windows from writing to that area again.

[Garfield]

Oh, thanks! I never knew that!

--Garfield

[Jmichael484]

not sure the name on the top of my head but there are many companies out there that if you send your drive to them, they can get the data back for you for about 30 to 50 bucks. lots of them are listed in the back of computer mags