Data Recovery Questions

[Goober]

Ok, in the latest escapade with this worthless, good-for-nothing computer (sorry, i'm whining, ignore this sentence please), I have randomly lost, or cannot access, about 15 folders. They held a variety of stuff, and all school work. Most were just Word or other similar documents, but some were movies. Either waym, they are all very important, as they were crap relating to school, projects, etc.

I don't know what happened, but they are, literally, not there. And they represented a few Gigs, and no change in the amount of space consumed in my HD.

I need help recovering this, some kind of Data Recovery, or something, please!!!

I really need this stuff back. Its kinda urgent.

 

[ummmm........]

I'm not a computer guy certainly, but did you already try going back to an earlier restore point? That usually works for me when the problem is with my computer and not an application.

 

[Goober]

Ick, I really don't wanna do that, I just did a lot of stuff to my computer, deleted about 10 Gigs of worthless crap, got rid of some redundant programs, and got new antiVirus and Firewall all hooked up. I really dun wanna have to re-do that, which took me like 4 hours to do.

That is a last-resort.

 

[ummmm........]

It won't bring back the things you deleted, but you would have to hook up the antivirus and firewall again I think . . .

I'm sure somebody who knows more about it will show up shortly, but whenever you make big changes like that, it never hurts to defrag and error check afterwards.

 

[Goober]

Well, I meant to defrag, but I wasn't done yet. Those files were the last that I had to organize and deal with.

Yes, I shall wait for somebody knowledge. I am positive thart there is Data Recovery solftware somewhere, either with Windows, or some free program.

 

[Zakharov]

Have you tried typing "hard disk data recovery program" into a search engine? It's the first thing I always do when I am looking for something.

A quick search on yahoo found this:

LINK

I'm sure there are other programs out there if you spend some time looking.

 

[Goober]

Well, yes, I could Google, but I like to ask others that have experience with this first, and to find the best free program.

See, I know nothing about Data Recovery, and I am not a person to jump into something without totally knowing what I am doing. But ya, I will try some programs.

 

[Zwelgje]

I've used PC Inspector File Recovery.
It worked great.
I did a new install on my computer, I deleted all files from my computer, formatted the HDD, re-installed Windows, found out I hadn't copied one folder with some quite important data in it...
I managed to recover quite a bit of the data, not all though.

For you:
Whatever you do, don't defrag!
The files are still on your disk but your computer doesn't know where to look (lost part of it's 'list of contents'). This program will scan your HD to see where there are possible files and will list them.

So download it and run it. Do it now. I don't know whether temporary internet files will be written over your stuff but I wouldn't take the risk.

 

[Goober]

Hmm, ok, I am trying the PC Inspector.

I DLed a trial one, and it found mostly everything, but that didn't help, 'cause I woulda had to pay to get the full version of the program, and, well . . . my parents really hate giving out their credit card number.

Thanks for the advice, it might just save my arse.

 

[Zwelgje]

It's shareware and free to use, for me...