Recovering Data once a drive has been formated with windows re-installed

Recovering Data once a drive has been formated with windows re-installed

Here is the scenario. A co-worker of mine was performing a migration to windows 7 pro from an xp box. They made a backup of the general user folders, but managed to miss a few critical folders that are stored elsewere. These folders contained critical year end excel documents. In their infinite wisdom they chose to format and re-install windows without making a backup image of the entire drive before hand.

Asked by: Guest | Views: 304

Total answers/comments: 2

Comments display order:

Guest [Entry]

"BartPE & WinHex would be my tool of choice. WinHex is pretty much unrivaled in the realm of computer forensics.

if you only need to recover data, then the 'lite version', called Davory (€33 for a personal license) will do the job. it is based on the same technology.

however, succes depends on the question if the files in question have been overwritten or not. you can run the trial version of Davory to find out if it can find the files you're after, but you will need a license to restore the files.

when using Davory on a formatted and overwritten disk choose the Physical Disk, not a logical drive."

Guest [Entry]

"Runtimedotorg has some recovery tools like GetDataBack FAT and GetDataBack NTFS that have a ""post format"" mode.

Bear in mind that if the data has been overwritten... the data has been overwritten."