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Recovering Data once a drive has been formated with windows re-installed


Here is the scenario. A co-worker of mine was performing a migration to windows 7 pro from an xp box. They made a backup of the general user folders, but managed to miss a few critical folders that are stored elsewere. These folders contained critical year end excel documents. In their infinite wisdom they chose to format and re-install windows without making a backup image of the entire drive before hand.


I was now given the task of attempting to retrieve the lost documents using any methods known to me.


I've already tried most of the usual programs like get data back, ontrack easy recovery and a few others. seeing the folder path and file names is not an issue but all of the excel documents I retrieve contain useless machine language.


Does anybody out there know of a program or method to pull some of these files successfully from the ether's of binary space? Or am I up a creek without a paddle on this one?



Answer



BartPE & WinHex would be my tool of choice. WinHex is pretty much unrivaled in the realm of computer forensics.


if you only need to recover data, then the 'lite version', called Davory (€33 for a personal license) will do the job. it is based on the same technology.


however, succes depends on the question if the files in question have been overwritten or not. you can run the trial version of Davory to find out if it can find the files you're after, but you will need a license to restore the files.


when using Davory on a formatted and overwritten disk choose the Physical Disk, not a logical drive.


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