Individual Data Recovery

crimson.cosmos · December 12, 2005

Hello there!

I formatted my HDD, but forgot some important files on one of the partitions. I seached and found several programs that restore a formatted HDD or partition to it's previous state, but that is not what I need. I have some new stuff on that partition now - data that I don't want to loose. So my question is: is there a program or another way for me to recover individual files from a formatted partition, without compromising the new data I have?

Thanks!

Sampson · December 13, 2005

I have no doubt that someone somewhere has such a program. I don't know of one, and like you I would be afraid to use it without some kind of backup. What I will propose is probably not what you were hoping for since it will require purchasing a new hard drive and Norton's Ghost.

This will be a little tedious:

If it were me, I would get a new hard drive and slave it to your existing hard drive. I would then Ghost an image of your present hard drive onto the new drive. I would then disconnect the old hard drive and make the new one the master and boot up the computer on it to make sure everything was running well.

I would then reconnect the old hard drive as the master and make the new hard drive a slave again. Then, run the software that will return your old hard drive to its previous state. If your software works, you will have access to your files. If these files are just data files, you can copy them to your new hard drive. If the software doesn't work, at least you have your new hard drive to keep your machine running, and as you research the recovery of the old partition you will have the old drive to experiment on.

Finally, if you are successful, make your new hard drive the master and your old hard drive the slave. Since you don't know how compromised the old hard drive is, it would be best to format it, and make it into a backup data drive.