Windows Vista question regarding deleted files
 

Computer Guru's, have a question for you.

The guy I am working with has a laptop with Windows Vista on it. He bought a USB portable hard drive to store some of his photos, music and so on while out on the road. Copied it from his laptop hard drive to the portable drive, then deleted the original files to make more room. Mistake...

One week later the USB drive is tits up. Drive powers up but the heads inside are making all sorts of difficult sounds, banging back and forth against the stops.

As usual he deleted much of the info from his laptop hard drive and its stuff that is not replaceable, and of course he did not make a CD/DVD backup. Yes he has learned but its hurting.

Two questions. Does Vista have anything like the old Norton Disk Doctor imbedded inside it where we can try to recover the old files if they have not been over-written? Second is if he did a system restore to something like two weeks ago, before he "cut and paste" the files to the USB drive, would he get the data back?

TIA,

Joe

Joe, if the files have been deleted from the Recycle Bin, then System Restore is the only hope. I "think" that if they were in the DOCUMENTS folder he should be ok, but I don't believe SR manages other file folders. It is really designed for installed applications, drivers, etc.

Hey, Joe! Happy New Year to ya!

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but System Restore is probably not gonna get those files back for you. By design, System Restore works mainly with the Registry and System Files on the computer. It typically will leave "production" files, i.e., Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, Image files, etc, alone, since they have nothing to do with how the "system" works.

Randy

Deleted files can be restored but YMMV.

It doesn't matter in which folder files were. When you delete them you just delete entries from file-system table. Files are still there on the harddrive. But (there is always a but) if you did lot's of writing on the hardrive after you deleted the files some of sectors where old files were might be overwritten. So some of salvaged files might be corrupt.

I recomend following:

Don't use the computer that you want your files slavaged from anymore. The less you use it the greater chances of salvaging your files intact are. There is a utility for XP called GetDataBack. It works well.

Use this utility and find out how much you can get back. Hopefully most of it is OK. If not and you need them really really much you can take the USB drive to data forensic company. I used IBAS and they should be one of the best in bussines. It's not cheap so you have to weight the value of files. They can open the drives and read the data direct from platters. I believe we are talking about 1-3k$

Thanks to all and will try the getdataback first then a SR.

I have never worked with Vista. Assume that its a NTFS format hard drive?

Thx,

Joe

On Track is pretty effective also.

Joe, verify that the external USB drive is getting enough juice.

Many of them come with two cables, standard USB which in many cases will supply enough juice in addition to data exchange. Sometimes you also need to plug the the wall wart in or use a second USB port on the laptop that plugs into the drives power socket.

If they don't get enough juice they will do that clicking thing.

Scott,

Thanks and that was my first thought as well. Used another USB cable and it did the same thing, even on different laptops, so its probably the drive.

Trying to recover things now and if not then will go to plan "B"...

bummer of a way to spend the new year.

Well, Happy New Year to you anyways.

If you are abroad wishing you safe travel back home.