Data Recovery

Okay, so someone thought it would be a good idea to install a new OS on my aunt's computer and she happens to be one of those poor souls who actually stores data on the C drive.

Question: Is it possible at all, post-incident, to salvage some of her media from the hard drive/partition? I just got a call from her so I don't have all the details yet, but I believe it was upgraded from Windows XP (to possibly 7). I would love to be able to tell with confidence the file format her data was stored in, but I can't.

From what I know, data recovery is done mainly in accidental situations where user's consent of deletion is not given. Regarding overwritten data, it is still being argued whether or not recovery is possible.

[URL="http://www.piriform.com/recuva"]http://www.piriform.com/recuva

T[/URL]he more she uses that computer, the less files she will be able to recover. Best bet would be taking the hard drive out of the computer, put it in a different computer and use the software linked above to recover as much as you can.

Exactly what I planned to do, thanks XL.

By the way, did you mean "the more she uses the computer" prior to the deletion or after? I understand new data being written over "available" data blocks causing difficulty in recovering, but that would imply "after".

After.

When your computer deletes stuff, it doesn't actually remove it from the hard drive. It just tells the operating system that those bits on the hard drive no longer represent a file on your system. So, the longer that she uses the computer, the higher the probability that critical bits will be overwritten leading to data destruction.

After.

When your computer deletes stuff, it doesn't actually remove it from the hard drive. It just tells the operating system that those bits on the hard drive no longer represent a file on your system. So, the longer that she uses the computer, the higher the probability that critical bits will be overwritten leading to data destruction.

See, that's the thing. I'm sure the data was wiped out via the set-up process (Press D to delete partition or something like that during windows XP installation), during which I doubt any operating system is running. I'm speaking from ignorance, though, so I hope it's possible.

And it was downgraded from Vista to XP, if that matters.

I like Pandora Recovery better than Recuva. Though having both isn't a bad idea either. http://www.pandorarecovery.com/