I stupidly formatted the wrong HDD when trying to fix another problem and i've lost all my music, Videos and most of my media files so need some advice on the best (free) partition/file recovery software. Cheers
Hi 3DO, This company: http://www.killdisk.com/products.htm Has the best erase and recover software. Hope it helps.
Cheers Gamesreview i'll be checking that out and see how it works out.. I've been looking at a few programs but they don't allow any files to be recovered in the demos/trial so i can't tell if they do a good job once in saving the files.
Free you won't find. Isn't your data worth spending a little on? You'll need another drive to recover it. When it's a few files, no problem. When it's a whole partition, that's a little trickier. Did you install Windows over the top before realizing your mistake? If so, good luck! Active@ software is reasonably priced. You can get demo versions to check it sees your files, too. I've used their products many times including recovering a customer's entire hard drive that was formatted. http://www.active-undelete.com/products.htm A lesson to all - if you have a drive you don't want to format - TAKE IT OUT! I always do this. There's no reason whatsoever for it to be connected when you're formatting and installing an OS on another drive.
I thought i'd not find anything free and yes my data is worth spending on so i will although its mostly music, video and random pictures so to me its not as important as it should be. It was actually a seperate drive from the one i was trying use so windows or that wasn't installed over it and it wasn't named properly so i stupildy didn't look twice and i only gt 2-3 seconds in befoe noticing but that was too late I normally take drives out when formatting but its normally someone else's PC and not my own so i can't afford to loose data then and . Will look at Active@ software see how that works.
Two words - BACK UP ;-) I've seen it countless times. Hell, it's people who don't bother who kept us in business lol. I find Active@ good. Killdisk, by the way, is data destruction software... I wouldn't use that! :lol: Uneraser (http://uneraser.com/) is only $50. Partition Recovery and File Recovery are even cheaper. The trial version will show you the files, but not let you recover them. It'll tell you if they're recoverable. If it sees them and says they are recoverable, it WILL recover them. ;-)
Cheers for the help guys i am going to purchase Active@ Uneraser as i tried the demo and it found all my files so its worth paying for the software to get them back.
Great stuff! Should go smoothly for you, then. Don't forget to put the recovered files on another drive. It will allow you to write to the same drive, which is pretty stupid, really! I've used both the DOS and Windows versions. The Windows version is great if you have another computer to put the drive in (or install Windows on another drive, of course). The DOS version has problems sometimes with file names, like it'll find a file called xUTOEXEC.BAT and ask you what the first letter should be, but it is great if you can't put the drive in another machine.
I got Window 7/Vista on a SATA and the formatted drive is an IDE and so far i've got my 11Gb or so of music back and it seems to all be there and working fine. Next time i'm going to not be so stupid and look twice at what i'm doing and i shall name my drives better so i can see whats what.
Hehe! Sometimes it doesn't matter what you name them - some software is incredibly poor! I had a system where Norton Ghost wouldn't work, so I had to use another piece of (DOS-based) software to clone drives. I put in two different drives (not even same make). They both came up by size - EXACTLY the same size, in bytes! ARGH! Glad it worked for you - that's a handy tool ;-) Why not just eliminate the need for a next time? BACK THAT SHIT UP! :lol: 11Gb of music is 3 DVDs. What's that, 10 minutes of burning? Then next time, if there is one, you can say "Oh well, I have a backup" ;-) The added advantage is that when the drive dies, you'll still have the stuff!
One word: GetDataBack (OK, 3 words...) Got my stuff back from a HDD that wouldnt even show in the devices list.
