Seeking suggestions for restoration of data

[bwitzed]

I have three harddrives and I had wanted to clean off the Acer installed Windows and install Pro which should have given me more control of my computer.  I really disliked that my 200GB drive was split into two.  However, when my brother went to wipe out and reinstall my computer, he was unable to remove the partition.  Something to do with Acer settings and all the wierd stuff they have in here.  Se la vie.

However, I made a HUGE mistake.  I backed up all my data from C & D (the 200GB drive) and E (the 80GB drive) to F (the 400GB drive).  The mistake I made was not removing it from my computer when I gave it to my brother.  hence, that is the first drive he formatted.  YIKES.  We ended up sending it out to my cousin who works for a company that supposedly got my data back.  but it is generally useless to me because my carefully organized tree is just gone and instead, all the files are organized into folders by type/extension and none of them have names.  It has been months now and I haven't gotten much off of the drive, though I have deleted some things.  I certainly have not gotten back my Quicken data, which is the only place the latest data was stored and since I did not receive any paper on my bank account for a year and a half, the only place I can find the data.  So I am hopeful that someone can suggest to me a program that might be able to restore my data back into useful form: with names and in the very carefully organized tree of folders and files I had.  I know that my manufacturer Seagate, makes a program and my brother had bought a different program for $80 that did the same thing we paid another $100 to do.  Does anyone know if the Seagate program works like II want it to or if any program does?  I should mention that I am broke and just borrowed from my credit card to pay my rent and bills this month, so expensive solutions are not an option. 

I really, really want my data back, especially my files, my Quicken and my Outlook files.  Can anyone help?

(It is said that nothing is ever really lost in computing.  Isn't that what forensic computing is about?  So why not with my data?)

[johkir]

You might try Restoration which I used a few years ago.  I have to say that I used it on a drive in which files were just erased.  If the drive was reformatted, you might be out of luck.

[bwitzed]

I'll give it a try.  Thanks, though his notes suggest that this is not its purpose and is unlikely to work.   so, does anyone else have suggestions?

[bphlpt]

I personally have had good success with Ontrack Easy Recovery Professional, which is able to recover some data even after a drive has been reformatted.  The current versions are quite expensive, but you might be able to find an old version on eBay or somewhere, and the program hasn't changed in many years.  The version I have is 6.03.04 from 2002, while the current version is 6.1.  There is a downloadable trial version available that can scan your drive and see what exactly can be recovered, and will allow you to recover 1 file, so at least you can see if the program can indeed do what you need.  It can read the drive in raw form.  How much data you will be able to recover will depend on the extent of the damage.  Whatever you do, until you have copied all the data you can off the damaged drive onto another medium, another HD, CD/DVD, or USB memory key, DO NOT WRITE TO THE DAMAGED DRIVE unless you want to risk the very likely loss of even more data.  Good luck and keep us informed.

Cheers and Regards.

[bwitzed]

Thanks.  I 'll check that out. 

BTW, has anyone out there tried Seagate's program?  I would love feedback on that.

[bwitzed]

  Thanks for the suggestion and the link to Restoration. It doesn't work at all on a reformatted drive but it does work great on disappeared files and folders.  I just restored this HUGE folder that was there one moment and gone the next, without my hitting delete or it asking me if I wanted to delete it.  Don't really know what happened but Restoration found it and got it up on a different drive. 

Now I just have to move it back, but I might try copy rather than cut just to be safe. 

[bwitzed]

Also, there is another issue with the files that were restored and are now numerically numbered: there are many, many duplicates. 

Can you suggest a program which will identify exact duplicates of files, regardless of their form (doc, mp3, exe, etc.)? 

[bphlpt]

See here http://bbs.blackviper.com/index.php/topic,1043.msg6586.html#msg6586.

Cheers and Regards.