[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
On Sat, 10 Jan 2009, Brown Richard wrote: > Thanks for all the replies. Unfortunately we can't go back to the > company, they went bust. What actually happened, is that there were two > drives on the second drive lay all this guys photos. He assumed that the > shop would not format the second drive, in fact he didn't want him to > format and reinstall the first drive but when he did he thought the > second drive would be safe. It wasn't and now a couple of years later he > is hoping I might be able to help. There has hardly been any data > written to the drive and he has some important family photos he hopes to > recover, so any help would be hugely helpful. The drive is formatted for > xp. There are 2 ways to format a drive under XP: Standard and quick. A standard format zeros the drive (AIUI), and a quick format just writes new empty directorys, and filesystem meta-data, etc. If it's been quick formatted, then there is a chance of recovery, but it won't be easy, and some data sectors may still have been overwritten. However, you're looking at expensive recovery, as someone will have to try to go through the old filesystem at the disk sector/block level and try to piece together the files. It's a long hard job, error prone and no guarantee of success, even with automated tools to do it. So why don't you just restore from backup? (I know, rhetorical question, he didn't have one. Bet he has one now, and if not, why not? Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html