I desperately need to recover files after a reformat
Hello experts,
I usually keep my desktop computer on all the time. It was running fine last night but when I woke up this morning I noticed a blue screen of death. The error said, "UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME".
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297185
Because it seemed to be exactly what was happening on my desktop. I went through the steps on it, did the chckdsk /r and the fixboot commands, but still nothing worked I would still get the blue screen when I restarted. One thing strange that I noticed though, was that my windows repair utility when the system booted off the widnows installation cd only told me that there was a windows installation on the D: drive. I have 2 drives in my computer, one is an older one that has an installation of XP and the other is a drive that I purchased less than a year ago, which is my main one. The main one is naturally drive C: and the older hard drive has always been drive D:. Now, since the repair utility from the Windows CD only told me there was an option to run chkdsk and fixboot as the article suggested on the D:, it made me start to think the C: drive had issues. Well, I decided then to reinstall windows over the previous windows installation on the C drive, because I've done that before and it repaired other issues ok. When it came time to select the partition of which drive to install the new installation of windows, it told me that there was an empty partition on C:. The new hard drive that is the C: is a 300gb SATA drive, and it was telling me that 300gb of free space was available. This really, really sucks. So I decided to install the new installation of windows on the empty partition on the C drive, and it is now reformatting the drive!!! Is there any possible way to recover the files on there!? I am such a fool for not having any backups of the drive on hand. Within the last hour I have ordered a 1 Terrabyte external hard drive from amazon.com because I have vowed that this kind of a scare will never, ever happen to me again, but is it too late? The format that it's doing right now is a full format, not the fast one, which I have read makes it harder to recover files but not all the way impossible. Is there a solution that isn't expensive? I very much appreciate help and advice.
Thank you!
I usually keep my desktop computer on all the time. It was running fine last night but when I woke up this morning I noticed a blue screen of death. The error said, "UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME".
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297185
Because it seemed to be exactly what was happening on my desktop. I went through the steps on it, did the chckdsk /r and the fixboot commands, but still nothing worked I would still get the blue screen when I restarted. One thing strange that I noticed though, was that my windows repair utility when the system booted off the widnows installation cd only told me that there was a windows installation on the D: drive. I have 2 drives in my computer, one is an older one that has an installation of XP and the other is a drive that I purchased less than a year ago, which is my main one. The main one is naturally drive C: and the older hard drive has always been drive D:. Now, since the repair utility from the Windows CD only told me there was an option to run chkdsk and fixboot as the article suggested on the D:, it made me start to think the C: drive had issues. Well, I decided then to reinstall windows over the previous windows installation on the C drive, because I've done that before and it repaired other issues ok. When it came time to select the partition of which drive to install the new installation of windows, it told me that there was an empty partition on C:. The new hard drive that is the C: is a 300gb SATA drive, and it was telling me that 300gb of free space was available. This really, really sucks. So I decided to install the new installation of windows on the empty partition on the C drive, and it is now reformatting the drive!!! Is there any possible way to recover the files on there!? I am such a fool for not having any backups of the drive on hand. Within the last hour I have ordered a 1 Terrabyte external hard drive from amazon.com because I have vowed that this kind of a scare will never, ever happen to me again, but is it too late? The format that it's doing right now is a full format, not the fast one, which I have read makes it harder to recover files but not all the way impossible. Is there a solution that isn't expensive? I very much appreciate help and advice.
Thank you!
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
SOLUTION
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
SOLUTION
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
SOLUTION
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
ASKER
Yes, you are absolutely right, I will never make such a foolish decision again. The funny thing is that I had this inclination to take it out and have my computer boot off of my other hard disk, but did I do that? No. So stupid of me.
Anyway, I have Easus demo version scanning the now reformatted drive which is a secondary drive. It has been running for about 45 minutes now and says it has a time remaining of 1 hour and 35 minutes. So far it says it has found a total file count of (and keeps growing every second) 231,254 files and has identified 42,402 (which also keeps growing) of them. I think that's a good sign, right?
I don't want to wait until Monday to copy the files over (the current drive I'm booting off of doesn't have sufficient space to copy the files onto) so I think I'm going to go to Best Buy here in a bit to buy another external drive. I contemplated buying 2 from amazon earlier today so this will be good anyway.
I can then install that external drive on my current good hard drive that I am booting off of and then choose to copy the files from the bad drive to the new external, right?
Anyway, I have Easus demo version scanning the now reformatted drive which is a secondary drive. It has been running for about 45 minutes now and says it has a time remaining of 1 hour and 35 minutes. So far it says it has found a total file count of (and keeps growing every second) 231,254 files and has identified 42,402 (which also keeps growing) of them. I think that's a good sign, right?
I don't want to wait until Monday to copy the files over (the current drive I'm booting off of doesn't have sufficient space to copy the files onto) so I think I'm going to go to Best Buy here in a bit to buy another external drive. I contemplated buying 2 from amazon earlier today so this will be good anyway.
I can then install that external drive on my current good hard drive that I am booting off of and then choose to copy the files from the bad drive to the new external, right?
It could happen that found files are unreadable, particularly when CHKDSK did its dirty job. So insure yourself. Your idea of buying new HDD to copy data to it is correct. At the same time I recommend you using some free utilities like Recuva and PSinspector.
http://www.recuva.com/
http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/file_recovery/info.htm?language=1
These tools could help you if easus fails to restore the data.
Also, the fact that you formatted the drive does not mean that your data is erased, to erase it you have to use wipe or overwriting which is not your aim as far as I could get you =)
I would try the following:
Connect the drive as slave to working PC.
Delete the newly formatted partition and then apply Undelete Partition to the empty space. Most possibly it will find two partitions, empty one and one which is your old partition with data on it.
Many partitioning software has Undelete option included. Just search for it. My Partition Manager 9.0 has it and did the trick many times when my customers managed (how do they manage that???) to format or delete drive in Windows.
http://www.recuva.com/
http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/file_recovery/info.htm?language=1
These tools could help you if easus fails to restore the data.
Also, the fact that you formatted the drive does not mean that your data is erased, to erase it you have to use wipe or overwriting which is not your aim as far as I could get you =)
I would try the following:
Connect the drive as slave to working PC.
Delete the newly formatted partition and then apply Undelete Partition to the empty space. Most possibly it will find two partitions, empty one and one which is your old partition with data on it.
Many partitioning software has Undelete option included. Just search for it. My Partition Manager 9.0 has it and did the trick many times when my customers managed (how do they manage that???) to format or delete drive in Windows.
are you installing Windows on the driver that you have just lost the data on?
If so, then you may not be able to safely recover your lost data.
Most data recovery programs specifically state that the data that you are trying to recover.
Not be on the OS partition. And that you run the program on another partition other then the one that you are trying to recover your data from.
I have had this happen in the past.
And used NTFS GetBackData = http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm
(Mentioned by: dbrunton)
And though I was able to recover over 75% of my files.
Most were corrupted.
Meaning:
Files had information within them from other files.
I do wish you the very best in this, as I know what you are going through.
Good Luck
And hope that someone's links will help you to at least get some of it back.
Carrzkiss
If so, then you may not be able to safely recover your lost data.
Most data recovery programs specifically state that the data that you are trying to recover.
Not be on the OS partition. And that you run the program on another partition other then the one that you are trying to recover your data from.
I have had this happen in the past.
And used NTFS GetBackData = http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm
(Mentioned by: dbrunton)
And though I was able to recover over 75% of my files.
Most were corrupted.
Meaning:
Files had information within them from other files.
I do wish you the very best in this, as I know what you are going through.
Good Luck
And hope that someone's links will help you to at least get some of it back.
Carrzkiss
Yes, once you buy a license to actually recovery the files (the demo will just show you what it can get -- but won't actually get them), you can select the destination for the recovered files => which can be an external drive.
... and it's certainly a good sign that it's finding lots of files :-)
There is one other alternative recovery utility that's less expensive than the above, and will actually recover the partition in place [It doesn't copy and/or recover data -- it simply restore the partition information]. http://www.partition-recovery.com/ I've used this for a friend who did a similar inadvertent reformatting and it worked perfectly. I didn't suggest it before, because it sounds like your drive likely has more than just a missing partition, since you were having problems before you did the reformat => but if you want to run the demo against the drive and see what it shows, it may save you the expense of an additional hard drive. In general, I do not like recovery programs that write to the drive being recovered => but in this case it only writes to the partition table; so IF it shows the correct partion info during its scan, it's reasonably safe to do that [Even if it messed up, the data would still be intact for the more robust recovery software]. Up to you if you want to try it ... running the demo scan won't hurt anything (it doesn't write anything) => you could base your decision on the results of that scan.
... and it's certainly a good sign that it's finding lots of files :-)
There is one other alternative recovery utility that's less expensive than the above, and will actually recover the partition in place [It doesn't copy and/or recover data -- it simply restore the partition information]. http://www.partition-recovery.com/ I've used this for a friend who did a similar inadvertent reformatting and it worked perfectly. I didn't suggest it before, because it sounds like your drive likely has more than just a missing partition, since you were having problems before you did the reformat => but if you want to run the demo against the drive and see what it shows, it may save you the expense of an additional hard drive. In general, I do not like recovery programs that write to the drive being recovered => but in this case it only writes to the partition table; so IF it shows the correct partion info during its scan, it's reasonably safe to do that [Even if it messed up, the data would still be intact for the more robust recovery software]. Up to you if you want to try it ... running the demo scan won't hurt anything (it doesn't write anything) => you could base your decision on the results of that scan.
>> I can then install that external drive on my current good hard drive that I am booting off of and then choose to copy the files from the bad drive to the new external, right?
Yes.
>> I think that's a good sign, right?
Hopeful. Depends on what may have been written to the disk at those locations. You won't know until you actually view the files.
And note garycase's comments above.
Yes.
>> I think that's a good sign, right?
Hopeful. Depends on what may have been written to the disk at those locations. You won't know until you actually view the files.
And note garycase's comments above.
ASKER
Thanks again everyone. I was able to get most everything back with the easeus data recovery wizard. I awarded most points to skywalker39 for being the first to point me to the software that ended up saving me but I also awarded dbrunton and garycase for elaborating on the process. Many thanks to everyone for assisting my desperate cry for help!
Thank you Gewgala!
ASKER