Harddisk recovery???

J

Jacob Tranholm

I have come into a situation which is a little out of my depth.
Yesterday I had to reinstall Win XP at a notebook (it was
virus-infected, and I couldn't get rid of the virus). Before doing this
I copied the default user folders and some more folders to an external
harddisk. - I then reinstalled Win XP, where the harddisk partition for
instance was changes from FAT32 to NTFS. But now I cannot gain access to
the external backup disk anymore, it looks like the disk simply has
died. This has been tested from many computers...

Now my question: How can I recover the old FAT32 filesystem from the
notebook harddrive. I have previously played a bit around with both NTFS
and FAT32 recovery, but I have never tried to combine these two. And at
the moment there is NTFS installed at the notebook where it previously
was FAT32. - And to make it even worse there was a full format of the
harddisk during the installation (not just the quick one).

It is vital that I can recover at least one of the directories from one
of the users documents folder.
 
D

Damian

Jacob said:
I have come into a situation which is a little out of my depth.
Yesterday I had to reinstall Win XP at a notebook (it was
virus-infected, and I couldn't get rid of the virus). Before doing
this I copied the default user folders and some more folders to an
external harddisk. - I then reinstalled Win XP, where the harddisk
partition for instance was changes from FAT32 to NTFS. But now I
cannot gain access to the external backup disk anymore, it looks like
the disk simply has died. This has been tested from many computers...

Now my question: How can I recover the old FAT32 filesystem from the
notebook harddrive. I have previously played a bit around with both
NTFS and FAT32 recovery, but I have never tried to combine these two.
And at the moment there is NTFS installed at the notebook where it
previously was FAT32. - And to make it even worse there was a full
format of the harddisk during the installation (not just the quick
one).
It is vital that I can recover at least one of the directories from
one of the users documents folder.

The NTFS format has absolutely _nothing_ to do with your inability to access
your external drive. Nothing!
 
T

Tzortzakakis Dimitrios

? "Jacob Tranholm said:
I have come into a situation which is a little out of my depth. Yesterday I
had to reinstall Win XP at a notebook (it was virus-infected, and I
couldn't get rid of the virus). Before doing this I copied the default user
folders and some more folders to an external harddisk. - I then reinstalled
Win XP, where the harddisk partition for instance was changes from FAT32 to
NTFS. But now I cannot gain access to the external backup disk anymore, it
looks like the disk simply has died. This has been tested from many
computers...

Now my question: How can I recover the old FAT32 filesystem from the
notebook harddrive. I have previously played a bit around with both NTFS
and FAT32 recovery, but I have never tried to combine these two. And at
the moment there is NTFS installed at the notebook where it previously was
FAT32. - And to make it even worse there was a full format of the harddisk
during the installation (not just the quick one).

It is vital that I can recover at least one of the directories from one of
the users documents folder.
Hi,
I think it would be a better idea to try to recover data from the external
backup disk, is it firewire or usb? Chances are high that you can do
something, the notebook's disk being fully formatted, it would be more
difficult (or impossible).
 
J

Jacob Tranholm

Tzortzakakis Dimitrios skrev:
Hi,
I think it would be a better idea to try to recover data from the external
backup disk, is it firewire or usb? Chances are high that you can do
something, the notebook's disk being fully formatted, it would be more
difficult (or impossible).

I have already tried that... And there is no hope what so ever of doing
that. It was USB...
 
J

Jacob Tranholm

Steve Urbach skrev:
Install A/V and updates FIRST, you don't want to get re-infected.

Since this is a notebook: Mount the drive in a USB enclosure(notebook drive
type or use a IDE cable to Notebook drive adapter in an USB IDE case)
Alternately, mount the drive in a PROTECTED desktop and copy the files to a
thumb drive or over the network)

The O/S will take care of FAT(32) and NTFS issues during the copy.

I can easily mount the drive using a different computer, that's not at
problem. And I also have plenty of A/V. But I don't quite understand
your instructions given that the original FAT32 partition is gone...
Because I thought I had a backup, I formatted the partition with NTFS
and installed a new Win XP SP3 on top of the old FAT32 partition. And
now I am trying to recreate the original FAT32 partition... Given that
the new XP installation only occupy a few gigabyte of diskspace, and the
rest never has been used since the format, I am hoping it should be
possible to recreate some of the lost data. Some of the data from the
first gigabytes of disk from the old FAT32 partition are probably lost,
or at least very difficult to recover, but I am hoping you can lead me
in the direction to recover some of the remaining gigabytes that has
never been used since the format.
 
C

chrisv

Jacob said:
Steve Urbach skrev:

I can easily mount the drive using a different computer, that's not at
problem. And I also have plenty of A/V. But I don't quite understand
your instructions given that the original FAT32 partition is gone...
Because I thought I had a backup, I formatted the partition with NTFS
and installed a new Win XP SP3 on top of the old FAT32 partition. And
now I am trying to recreate the original FAT32 partition... Given that
the new XP installation only occupy a few gigabyte of diskspace, and
the rest never has been used since the format, I am hoping it should
be possible to recreate some of the lost data. Some of the data from
the first gigabytes of disk from the old FAT32 partition are probably
lost, or at least very difficult to recover, but I am hoping you can
lead me in the direction to recover some of the remaining gigabytes
that has never been used since the format.

You are hopelessly in over your head. Take it to a repair shop.
 
J

Jacob Tranholm

Damian skrev:
The NTFS format has absolutely _nothing_ to do with your inability to access
your external drive. Nothing!

I don't recall ever saying that... I have already given up on the
external drive, I am looking for some way of recovering the data on the
internal drive, where the major problem has to be the format to NTFS.
And how to go back in time... and undo the format. The virus at the
computer was messing with Windows own files which for instance prevented
me from installing any software or boot up in failsafe mode. I should
naturally just have taken the drive, and scanned it from a different
computer, but I chose to reinstall instead, and now I am paying for my
choice. Seen from my point of view NTFS is far better than FAT32 both
from a security point of view, where the owner of the files is specified
in NTFS, and also that it is a journaled file system. So I am not
blaming NTFS... I am actually mostly blaming myself for not taking
backup to 2 harddrives instead of just one.
 
G

G. Morgan

Jacob said:
Tzortzakakis Dimitrios skrev:

I have already tried that... And there is no hope what so ever of doing
that. It was USB...

You are screwed. The best hope you have is to get a professional recovery
specialist. It's not gonna be cheap either. You better hope those lost files
are not super-important.

If you are too cheap to use a professional, and don't really value your
customer's data (as previously demonstrated), you could try:
http://www.filehippo.com/download_file_recovery/
 
J

Jacob Tranholm

chrisv skrev:
You are hopelessly in over your head. Take it to a repair shop.

The major problem is finding a repair shop in Denmark, who knows how to
do it. If I can find the repair shop, I will pay the costs. I have done
this myself several times before when there was no formats involved
(that's usually pretty simple). But have no experience when is involves
formats...
 
J

Jacob Tranholm

G. Morgan skrev:
You are screwed. The best hope you have is to get a professional recovery
specialist. It's not gonna be cheap either. You better hope those lost files
are not super-important.

If you are too cheap to use a professional, and don't really value your
customer's data (as previously demonstrated), you could try:
http://www.filehippo.com/download_file_recovery/

Where can I find a professional recovery specialist? I am a bit afraid
of trying too much myself, especially if there is a risk of corrupting
the data even more.
 
G

G. Morgan

Jacob said:
G. Morgan skrev:

Where can I find a professional recovery specialist? I am a bit afraid
of trying too much myself, especially if there is a risk of corrupting
the data even more.

Google "data recovery service"

It's not cheap...
 
J

Jacob Tranholm

G. Morgan skrev:
You are screwed. The best hope you have is to get a professional recovery
specialist. It's not gonna be cheap either. You better hope those lost files
are not super-important.

If you are too cheap to use a professional, and don't really value your
customer's data (as previously demonstrated), you could try:
http://www.filehippo.com/download_file_recovery/

They are important to the owner of the files... And in the future I am
quite certain he will take backups.

I have looked at bit into the software suggested, and as far as I can
see it will only read the data and not corrupt it even further. I will
try to use the software, and hope for the best, and if it doesn't work,
I will have to go to a specialist (if I can find one).
 

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