[HELP] Data Recovery

Hey guys, long time no see. Unfortunatly i have no time for babble as i am in need of help, and expert help.

Case is this:


A few weeks ago my fathers pc stopped working all of a sudden, windows BSOD upon boot. As i was going to leave for holiday in a few days i advised him to take it to a PC store and have them fix it. They indeed fixed it by reinstalling windows but at the same time removing most of his data. The shops owner says he cannot recall which of the techies worked on it and even claimed that 'they would never do that' but thats rather irrelevant at this time as i've got some data that needs to be salvaged.

There were three HDD's in the system of which two were affected. One contained the original Windows XP installation and, on a separate partition, a large number of 'private' files including hand-ins andresults of students of my father, many school-related documents of my brother and sister and a large number of photographs. The second one contained mostyl larger audio and video files. Both drives' partition tables seem to have been changed and probably been formatted (unsure on format type).

First one to scream 'backup' will recieve a swift kick in the nuts, cause that has been done but the most recent one is from a few months ago.

The PC hasn't been used since he noticed that the files were missing so they *should* still be there, remains the question how to get to them. These are the drives:

WD2000. 200GB, SATA, NTFS
Maxtor DM10 300GB, SATA, NTFS

Right now one of them is in my main computer being scanned by R-studio, a recovery program someone advised me, but its halfway the drive now and hasnt come up with any files as far as i can see. I could use some advice as to what software to use and more specifically, how, cause i have little experience with data recovery like this.

I normally use Ontrack Easy Recovery Pro or GetDataBack NTFS. With stuff like this, I don't care how long it really takes so I normally will do as many different recovery methods as it takes to get the data back.

Obviously, first thing to do is not write to those drives anymore. A simple format usually doesn't do anything bad. Writing over the data is bad.

r-tools Data recovery, small footprint but saved my butt many times! i have used otnrack, not worth the price tag, nor did it work for me, told me it could find nothing, when r-tools got everything back.

I have used Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Software with remarkably good result. Has helped me in recovering my lost data. Stellar Phoenix powered by ‘Raw File Recovery’ that recognizes & recovers more than 300 file types including documents, spreadsheets, web content & images.
You should try the demo version, download it from: http://www.stellarinfo.com/partition-recovery.htm scan your hard drive and see what the demo shows, if you are able to see your data through demo then get the full version to save it.

Best of luck

Thanks for the suggestions everyone, ill have a go at it. R-studio now scanning the second drive and its full of 'specified file docs' while windows itself shows it as empty, so i guess thats good.

Alright after a looong time r-studio finished scanning the disc and it fount about 40gb of apparantly 'recoverable' data, however i need to buy it in order to work and 80$ is a bit much at this stage.

I tried testdisk (a free one) but that doesnt find anything..anyone know good free software or one i can test thoroughly before buying?

It appears ive done it..using 'power data recovery' (free app) i scanned both drives and got nearly all the data back. YAY.

Well done man!

And I won't mention anything about backups because I want to have children one day...

Glad to hear that!

Yeah after all it was easier than i thought, as long as you get the right software for the job. PDR scanned both drives (about 30mins for every 100GB), and then i just salvaged everything that came up, and it appears nearly all the important stuff was among it.