data recovery - Restoring pictures from formated drive
2014-04
Davidenko
My hard drive was formatted, and installed new windows. I wanted to restore images so I used iCare data recovery software. Some pictures were restored, and some are restored but i can't open them. Is there any free program that can repair broken images? And also is there a better program than iCare, restoring took more then two days for 200GB drive!
BillyData
First of all if you formatted and reinstalled Windows then there is a good chance you have written over at least a few sectors that contained data you are looking for. Not guaranteed but a really good chance. Once that happens there is nothing that can restore that file.
There is no program that can restore a picture that won't open or is missing data because it has been over written. There is no program that can recover data that has been written over period. Your pictures are likely corrupt and won't open because this is what happened.
You have to understand that when your data is written to the drive it can be written in many different places on the platter, not necessarily all in one nice spot. (Hence the need for fragmenting which rearranges and consolidates the fragments)
The first thing to do when accidentally formatting a drive is stop there. At this point it is true that software might help you recover it but you should know the dangers of using it before you attempt. There is a good post about that here.
There are plenty of good data recovery companies our there like KrollOntrack and DriveSavers. Problem is they are mostly really expensive, so an smaller company that is just as good at recovering data with the same tools like SERT Data Recovery might be a more reasonably priced option to go with if your data is actually important to you.
nifr
I have successfully used Photorec in the past.
It's been written by Christophe Grenier (CGSecurity) who also wrote TestDisk.
With Testdisk you can recover lost/formatted partitions and repair/restore their MFTs (master file tables) and partition-tables.
Another great tool with a decent GUI is DMDE (DM Disk Editor and Data Recovery Software). It provides similar features and can also be used to recover RAID volumes.
If you're looking for a way to recover lost TrueCrypt partitions - TestCrypt might be able to help.
Data recovery is slow in general and performance will vary based on the read-speed, disk-size, ...
Alexey Sviridov
I formatted my HDD by mistake, and need to restore data from it.
There is no way to attach an additional HDD to the computer where the mistake happened.
I booted from a Linux CD and copied an image of the whole drive to another computer by network
(dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/samba_share/hdd.img), on the image of the formatted drive there were two NTFS partitions.
I know there are programs for restoring data from formatted drives, but is there a way to restore any data from that image?
Ganesh R.
I think, you mean to say that you copied the whole drive (after it was accidentally formatted) & saved it on the network and you want to know if your data can be recovered from that copy.
As far as I know, No. As you said, there are softwares that retrieve data from formatted drives. (As far as Windows goes) They do that by reading the FAT table entries that were recently flagged as deleted. Then they try to make out if there was anything useful on the actual hard-drive space. So as you see,they will need the actual FAT table to work on.
Now, copying will only copy data that is present on hard-disk & is NOT marked as deleted. Hence all the FAT table entry will not be present.
Instead I suggest that you try to again boot from your Linux Live CD, try and recover your data from the actual hard-drive. Or you can try UBCD which is another wonderful recovery bootable CD.
EDIT: Since you have already copied the HDD image to another PC, it is worth trying to retrieve your data from the HDD. You can try TestDisk. Its free & only 1.5 MB.