Data Recovery options after Restore

[Richard Thomas]

Hi,

I'm writing on behalf of my Uncle. His Windows XP Home laptop failed
to boot this morning, citing a problem with the Registry Hive.

He took the computer to his local computer store, who, it seems,
didn't try anything to recover the data, they just used the System
Restore Disc that came with the machine to reinstall Windows. Not a
satisfactory outcome.

I'm not sure what this System Restore Disc did, whether it copied an
image to the drive, or actually reinstalled WinXP, but, short of
sending the harddrive off to one of these data recovery services, are
there any software tools that people could recommend to that might be
able to recover data?

I know there are undelete tools out there, but I don't know whether
they'd work after a system restore like that!

Thanks in advance for any help

Richard

 

[Tom Porterfield]

Hi,

I'm writing on behalf of my Uncle. His Windows XP Home laptop failed
to boot this morning, citing a problem with the Registry Hive.

He took the computer to his local computer store, who, it seems,
didn't try anything to recover the data, they just used the System
Restore Disc that came with the machine to reinstall Windows. Not a
satisfactory outcome.

I'm not sure what this System Restore Disc did, whether it copied an
image to the drive, or actually reinstalled WinXP, but, short of
sending the harddrive off to one of these data recovery services, are
there any software tools that people could recommend to that might be
able to recover data?

I know there are undelete tools out there, but I don't know whether
they'd work after a system restore like that!

It's possible but the chances of success are quite small. Typically
these recovery disks start by partitioning, formatting and reinstalling
the OS to the original load. This will overwrite most sectors of the
drive where data was stored. You don't have much to lose at this point
by trying one of the available recovery tools, but don't hold out much
hope that much will be recoverable. Professional recovery services
could probably do even more, but you start getting into significant cost
factors. It really comes down to how much is the data worth?

This only reinforces the need for good backups. Any data worth keeping
is worth backing up to a good backup source.
--
Tom Porterfield
MS-MVP MCE
http://support.telop.org

Please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup only.

 

[Recover My Photos]

Hi,

Download the demo from www.recovermyfiles.com and run a "format recover". I
find it works best if you select some file types that were on the PC, such
as 'doc', 'xls' and 'wav' (you will see what I mean when I run the program).
It will recover any of the original files that were not overwritten by the
new installation of XP. In the demo version you can view the contents of the
deleted files. You will have to work out from that whether it is worth
registering the program to save what you have found.

Good luck