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A Good recovery software ?

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Hi Everyone..
Can anyone recommend me a software that can help me recover my whole partition which was accidentally formatted ?

This is the situation in order..
1. Partition wiped out accidentally and pc could not boot.

2. I used my xp install cd to boot up and found my C drive was empty (completely unused)

3. Formatted the disk using NTFS file format (Quick)

4. Reinstalled XP on the fresh C drive

5. Boot up

6. Installed RecoveryMyFiles and used the Fomat Search to recovery formatted hard drive

7. Waited for 16 hours !!!!! then saved all the files onto my 80gb D drive.

8. And finally got the partition BUT there are too many corrupted files.. almost all the documents and excel files could not be read properly… and about 90% of .jpgs are corrupted.

I tried to use Irfanview to open the .jpg which couldn’t show intially, but still fail.
It says that the file header could be found…

P/S

Because RecovermyFiles do not allow me to save the found files onto the drive that it has scanned, i have to save all of the files onto my D drive. But before that, i have transferred all my files from D drive to C, to create space. This is done after Recovermyfiles have scanned for the formatted partition.

I know that the golden rule for recovery of hard disk is not to write anything else to the drive (in this case my C drive). But I have unknowingly formatted with NTFS, and reinstalled XP. And have done the file transfer from D to C.
Could this make my mission completely hopeless?

Is there any hope of recovering my partition still? I certainly hope someone can point me in the right direction.

Thanks a lot, in advance!

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Clarifications

In reply to A Good recovery software ?

Clarifications

No it’s not completely hopeless but it’s going to be much more expensive

In reply to A Good recovery software ?

You will need a new HDD and some Forensic Recovery Software at the very least and a USB Caddy to stick the existing HDD into or

Send this drive away to a Data Recovery House that can perform a Forensic Recovery and replace the existing drive with a new one as these are really cheap now and not worth the time and money spent attempting to recover DATA off them.

Col

OH Smeg is right

In reply to A Good recovery software ?

Just formatting the drive and stopped, you might have been OK. But, reinstalling XP causes data to be written to the clusters that were flagged as in use before, and are now free because the NTFS file table is new. Installing RecoverMyFiles only made things worse. I’ve heard that Ontrack Data Recovery is a decent disaster recovery outfit. Good luck.

Agree

In reply to A Good recovery software ?

Ontrack (http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/) is a good data recovery source, but you may also want to look into DriveSavers (http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/). They have done things like this before for some of my older customers and were able to recover a lot of files, but remember that EACH CASE is different and is not guarenteed! Best of luck to you.

This can help prevent the same mistake

In reply to A Good recovery software ?

I don’t know much about recovering what is already gone. But to prevent this from happening again, here a free tool for imaging your hard drive.

Clonezilla

You can DL and .iso image and burn it to a CD with a program like InfraRecorder.

InfraRecorder

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