I'm having a total meltdown here.

Everything I had from England, my files, my photos, years of teaching resources was on an external HD. My son borrowed it against my better judgement to transfer a file from his XBox. Or so I thought.

He has reformatted my HD to be compatible with his XBox and I've lost everything.

My whole life was on that HD.

Is there anything I can do to get it back??

Please help, you may be about to save a 14 year old life.

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Reality Internet Personality

I'm having a total meltdown here.

Everything I had from England, my files, my photos, years of teaching resources was on an external HD. My son borrowed it against my better judgement to transfer a file from his XBox. Or so I thought.

He has reformatted my HD to be compatible with his XBox and I've lost everything.

My whole life was on that HD.

Is there anything I can do to get it back??

Please help, you may be about to save a 14 year old life.

I did a Google Search and found quite a bit, Good Luck. I wish I could be of further help, But as long as nothing is written to that drive, The info is still there, It just needs to be copied off of there onto another drive and that requires special software.

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

There are firms that offer data recovery, they usually do a test (often free) to see if data is there before recovering it.

There's a news item in the Toronto Star

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/809352--owner-hopes-for-recovery-of-photos-from-stolen-laptop?bn=1

I'm having a total meltdown here.

Everything I had from England, my files, my photos, years of teaching resources was on an external HD. My son borrowed it against my better judgement to transfer a file from his XBox. Or so I thought.

He has reformatted my HD to be compatible with his XBox and I've lost everything.

My whole life was on that HD.

Is there anything I can do to get it back??

Please help, you may be about to save a 14 year old life.

I did a Google Search and found quite a bit, Good Luck. I wish I could be of further help, But as long as nothing is written to that drive, The info is still there, It just needs to be copied off of there onto another drive and that requires special software.

I think the info is still there. The BF has a program that he things can recover it and is attempting to do so.

I am just in shock. I hadn't backed it all up further because I haven't bought a computer yet, I only have a netbook :(

Apparently this is something that has happened to others when trying to do things with Xboxes. Someone else I know managed to reformat their whole hard drive.

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Reality Internet Personality

You may not be able to recover the data but one thing you should look at is Data Rescue. You will need additional room to save the data to so if your computer disk is full, that may mean another external disk drive.

I have had very good luck with these products and even used the Apple version to recover a crashed laptop disk ( I only needed a few files on it that hadn't been backed up yet}.

You should also look at backup of important files. In my case, I back up to a detachable drive and keep an additional copy on my laptop. I also do some backups to DVDs/CDs as well.

Good luck because if the data was over written it may be lost forever.

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Recuva works quite well, and it's free. You'll need another hard drive that is large enough to store all the recovered data.

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

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I know some police departments that do computer crimes have some software that can find stuff criminals didnt want to be found. Maybe they can help you recover your files just for practice?

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[/quote]

Old James

AFAIK, IIRC, if you delete files/folder over the own Windows tool it's possible to restore it. Because Windows delete only the path to the files. The files are still there.

If you would like to delete files to 100 %, you need a special tool which write (nonsense) ~ 100x to the place where the file is/was saved on HDD.

But, if you format (not quick format) a HDD in DOS everything will be away.
So I think it depend how the XBOX formatted the HDD. Maybe with quick format you have chance that all is there, only the path is away.

Or, because of different file systems everything is away.

Wish you good luck!

And be friendly to your naively child. ;-)

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Best of luck with it!!!

The worst my kids (kitties) ever did to me was wipe out several hours of a poem composition that I was working on and had not saved yet.

One of them bounced offa da keyboard and it went *poof*.

A few blue words, but kitty did not mean it. They are usually such good lil' rascals. I forgave her in a few moments.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

I have two exterior WD drives to back up all important data. Each one is a mirror of the other and encrypted in case of theft. My kids reformatting never crossed my mind but drives do fail and I'm not willing to lose everything over it.

I hope you can get everything back.

If you would like to delete files to 100 %, you need a special tool which write (nonsense) ~ 100x to the place where the file is/was saved on HDD.

Writing more than once for secure erase is only necessary on floppy drives, that's why

if you format (not quick format) a HDD in DOS everything will be away.

Because in this case the entire drive was once overwitten with zeros.

Maybe with quick format you have chance that all is there, only the path is away.

Or, because of different file systems everything is away.

Quick format does not overwrite the entire drive, so most of the files should be still there, even if the file system changed. However, you can't recover the files with tools like Recuva, which simply search in the MFT for deleted files. Or at least I do not know any free programs, which can do that. So if the drive was formated, you will probably need a some professional software or a company which does that for you.

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I had a lot of success with GetDataBackNTFS (assuming your HD was formatted as NTFS).

The important thing is not to do anything else which will write to the problem disk so any recovery should be READONLY so you will need another disk to transfer the recovered files to. Any recovery which involves writing back to the same disk will more than likely write over the data you are trying to recover and you will lose something!

The severity of the problem will depend on what exactly the Xbox did.

There is information on the drive about the partitions and the file information tables as well as the actual data.

Chances are the partition details only have been wiped.

GetDataBack will analyze the disk and recover the data files even if the partition information has been trashed.

What a nightmare - I wish you the best of luck in recovering the data.


John.

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GPU Users Group

If you would like to delete files to 100 %, you need a special tool which write (nonsense) ~ 100x to the place where the file is/was saved on HDD.

Writing more than once for secure erase is only necessary on floppy drives, that's why

Yes, yes, they showed it in TV..
They bought 'formatted' HDDs over eBay and had then nice pics, files and other nice stuff from the first owner.

If you would like to delete files in Windows (which are on your HDD), you need a prog which write ~ 100x over the place where the file was. Tools for free are in the Inet.

Or if you would like to sell your old HDDs, you need to format the HDD complete (not in Windows).
Or if you would like to kick your HDD to the trash, you should take before a hammer and caress the HDD with it.. :o)

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I'm having a total meltdown here.

Everything I had from England, my files, my photos, years of teaching resources was on an external HD. My son borrowed it against my better judgement to transfer a file from his XBox. Or so I thought.

He has reformatted my HD to be compatible with his XBox and I've lost everything.

My whole life was on that HD.

Is there anything I can do to get it back??

Please help, you may be about to save a 14 year old life.

DON'T write anything further to that drive!

Right now there is NO protection to prevent it from over-writing anything. As others have stated, your data is still there - albeit a little more difficult (read $) to recover now.

BUT under no circumstances write anything to that drive.

Don't plug it in, don't let an amateur with an app downloaded off the internet recover you. If this is that important, take a deep breath and find a data recovery service in the area you are in.

Repeat - don't let an amateur try their hand at this, if this is that important. Honestly, the money is worth it if you are facing what you say you are. The alternatives are a truly trashed drive that is (for the moment) potentially recoverable.

Best of luck with it.

Regards,

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I'm having a total meltdown here.

Everything I had from England, my files, my photos, years of teaching resources was on an external HD. My son borrowed it against my better judgement to transfer a file from his XBox. Or so I thought.

He has reformatted my HD to be compatible with his XBox and I've lost everything.

My whole life was on that HD.

Is there anything I can do to get it back??

Please help, you may be about to save a 14 year old life.

DON'T write anything further to that drive!

Right now there is NO protection to prevent it from over-writing anything. As others have stated, your data is still there - albeit a little more difficult (read $) to recover now.

BUT under no circumstances write anything to that drive.

Don't plug it in, don't let an amateur with an app downloaded off the internet recover you. If this is that important, take a deep breath and find a data recovery service in the area you are in.

Repeat - don't let an amateur try their hand at this, if this is that important. Honestly, the money is worth it if you are facing what you say you are. The alternatives are a truly trashed drive that is (for the moment) potentially recoverable.

Best of luck with it.

Regards,

Data Rescue and I suspect several other programs don't recover in place. They only read the problem drive and transfer the data to some other drive. These programs are some of the same software that data recovery services use. Because the drive was formated, most of the data should still be out there and can be recovered with standard software as long as it avoids in place recovery.
When I recovered my files, I had to provide a ZIP drive because the program would not touch the problem drive.

If a drive had a head crash or if the full disk was overwritten, the professional services sometimes can recover the data but it will cost a good deal for their services because they need to more than just run a special software application. I have been using Pro Soft products for a while and the software works. The applications are not free but you get what you pay for.

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Wow, thanks for all the suggestions.

The Xbox reformatted the drive to FAT-32. The software my boyfriend was using to try and recover it (I am not sure what program he is using) as identified that there is actually data still there.

I don't know if the teenager wrote any thing from his XBox over my files though :(

He claims he can recover it by copying it onto his HD, but he has had to make make some space for it before he tries.

Needless to say I won't be allowing the teenager near my HD again.

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Reality Internet Personality

Wow, thanks for all the suggestions.

The Xbox reformatted the drive to FAT-32. The software my boyfriend was using to try and recover it (I am not sure what program he is using) as identified that there is actually data still there.

I don't know if the teenager wrote any thing from his XBox over my files though :(

He claims he can recover it by copying it onto his HD, but he has had to make make some space for it before he tries.

Needless to say I won't be allowing the teenager near my HD again.

Looks like Your BF entered Your life in just the nick of time, To save a damsel in distress, Unknown to either You or Him at the time of course.

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

Wow, thanks for all the suggestions.

The Xbox reformatted the drive to FAT-32. The software my boyfriend was using to try and recover it (I am not sure what program he is using) as identified that there is actually data still there.

I don't know if the teenager wrote any thing from his XBox over my files though :(

He claims he can recover it by copying it onto his HD, but he has had to make make some space for it before he tries.

Needless to say I won't be allowing the teenager near my HD again.

Looks like Your BF entered Your life in just the nick of time, To save a damsel in distress, Unknown to either You or Him at the time of course.

I just hope he can save the digits in distress....

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

Yes, yes, they showed it in TV..
They bought 'formatted' HDDs over eBay and had then nice pics, files and other nice stuff from the first owner.

Quick formated.

If you would like to delete files in Windows (which are on your HDD), you need a prog which write ~ 100x over the place where the file was. Tools for free are in the Inet.

Tools like that are pure nonsense, once is enough. Please read that (german). And here the english abstract of the publication. Unfortunately I can't find the complete publication.

That's why it's so important for to save most of the files to write anything to the drive. If it was necessary to overwrite the data 100 times before they are gone, who would care if they are overwritten two or three times while trying to recover them?

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If you would like to delete files in Windows (which are on your HDD), you need a prog which write ~ 100x over the place where the file was. Tools for free are in the Inet.

Tools like that are pure nonsense, once is enough. Please read that (german). And here the english abstract of the publication. Unfortunately I can't find the complete publication.

While I agree with you most of the time one write pass will make the data almost impossible to recover, Government security rules require multi pass writes to remove the risk of data recovery. Disk heads don't always write on track and there are ways to recover this side data. It is a very costly process and the only ones who will put out the money to do it are associated with the government. The average every day user need not worry unless they are doing something illegal.

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