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To big hard drive.

Posted: Fri Sep 17, 2010 5:29 pm
by Arte
I've been trying way to many recovery programs, so far this one was the best for it found all the files (with out the names, I accidentally deleted the MFT).
Now my problem is I don't have space to recover all the data. it is about 900 GB worth of data and my laptop hard disk as like 300 GB left (this is an external hard drive that got "virtually" damaged [Windows said: "you must format this drive to use it"] when I was trying to salvage data from my old laptop HD that was failing). So what I needed the program to do is update the MFT (i don't care about the file names, most of the files are over 400 mb large) with what the program found on the same drive. Can this tool do that? If not can you redirect me to a tool that is able to do this?

It is my understanding it should not be very hard to do, since the program knows where, what and how much the file is, it should just write to the MFT file "24948.mkv" sector xxx to xxx. Of course this is my own understanding of the situation and might be wrong.

The file system is NFTS, the program found all the files I wanted, now I got no where to stuff them (and obviously I don't want to over write data on the same drive).

Re: To big hard drive.

Posted: Sat Sep 18, 2010 10:44 am
by Alt
No, R-Studio cannot change the data on the disk so that the files would appear in the MFT, and never will be able to do so. The reason is simple - it's too dangerous. One mistake, and the files may be gone for good. There're software that can do this (often called "on-place recovery"), but I don't recommend you to use it, well, unless you're interested in the process rather than the result of data recovery.
I recommend the following for the cases like yours: borrow a disk from your friend, save the recovered files to it, re-format yor disk and copy them back to it. This seems too complicated, but follow a very important rule of safe data recovery: never ever think about changing the original data unless all the required files are copied to a safe place. And such rules are written not in ink, but in human sweat and tears.