Hard drive formatted, want to recover old data

A forum on data recovery using the professional data recovery software R-STUDIO.
Jere
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Joined: Thu Aug 27, 2009 11:40 pm

Hard drive formatted, want to recover old data

Post by Jere » Thu Aug 27, 2009 11:55 pm

So I had a laptop break down on me. Basically long story short it went to a repair shop. I didn't have time to take out the HDD and copy all the data that I needed before giving it to the repair shop.

They fixed the problem (turned out to be a faulty GPU chip that overheated) however they ended up having to format the HDD during the process. I tried to prevent them from doing so but in the end I said I could probably recover it anyways.

The drive I'm trying to recover from is a Segate 2.5" SATA 149 GB HDD and was using a NTFS partition (I assume since it came already formatted and setup from the factory). There were 2 partitions on the drive. 1 was a C drive and I believe ~140 GB the other was a "recovery partition" to create a recovery disc from and was ~8-9 Gb.

So, basically using R-Studio I've scanned the drive to be recovered from however it seems that it recognizes something like 100 different "partitions" if that's the right word. Once the "scan" is complete there are about 15-20 red coloured entries, 4 green coloured entries, and probably 40-50 yellow entries. I'm just wondering is there a way to pick the right "recognized partition" without being omniscient? I mean it's obvious that certain "recognized partitions" can't be the one I'm looking for. eg. some "start" at 140Gb and it thinks that the partition in question is 140 GB, some start at other weird numbers such as 25 GB or 50 GB there are 2 partitions that actually start at 31 kb but I do not think that those are the right partitions I'm looking for.

So basically how do I go about this in a smart way instead of going through all 100 or so "recognized partitions" or trying to guess and test.

Alt
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Re: Hard drive formatted, want to recover old data

Post by Alt » Fri Aug 28, 2009 5:05 am

Well, I'd try the green ones first.
Then the yellow ones starting from those which start/size seem closer with the parameters of the original logical disk.
You don't have to recover all files to see whether you selected the right one. Just see if its folders tree is correct, then select a large enough graphic file and double-click it to preview.

BTW, I've never heard that changing a CPU chip requires disk re-formatting.

Jere
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Aug 27, 2009 11:40 pm

Re: Hard drive formatted, want to recover old data

Post by Jere » Fri Aug 28, 2009 10:25 am

What I meant was they had to reformat the HDD during the process of fixing the laptop. It probably wasn't related, however somehow somewhere during the process a reformat was "required", I said to try and not format but in the end they consulted me and I gave the go ahead.

Oh yeah.... I don't think I'm using the latest version of R-studio right now. I believe it may be version 2.0 (bought and DL'ed probably a good 4-5 years ago).

I can't actually find this "preview" that is explained in the current online manual. However I do see a "view" option which brings me to a hex editor.

Alt
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Joined: Tue Nov 11, 2008 2:13 pm
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Re: Hard drive formatted, want to recover old data

Post by Alt » Fri Aug 28, 2009 12:09 pm

I certanly recommend you to upgrade to the last version.

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