NTFC unformat?

[mentaluproar]

I have a friend who ran a system recovery on his HP tower that didn't go very well and cost him all of his files. It won't boot at all, so there was nothing gained from this endeavor.

Many of the files are likely overwritten and impossible to access, but I know there must be a way to recover some files from the drive. Basically, I'mm looking for a freeware tool that can run on a mac and recover files from a reformatted/repartitioned NTFS volume. Music, movies, photos, documents, etc. We really don't care about the OS or the applications.

Seeing as I only have OSX, ubuntu, and a virtualized copy of windows 7 to work with, I don't really know what to do with this.

Has anyone used any OSX recovery tools on NTFS volumes successfully? Do you have any recommendations?

 

[b06tmm]

Sorry to hear about your friend's dilemma. I've been successful in recovering files before, but not after a reformat/repartition.

There are a few apps that claim to be able to recover stuff like that but the free ones I've tried were just smoke dreams.

Two free ISO's that comes to mind is Hiren's BootCD and ERD Commander. Hiren's has some recovery tools and ERD Commander can recover deleted files.

I've used ERD Commander to change passwords but not recover files and I have a friend that swears by Hiren's but I don't know if he's ever used it to recover files.

Both of those run under Windows...

 

[MJL]

I have a friend who ran a system recovery on his HP tower that didn't go very well and cost him all of his files. It won't boot at all, so there was nothing gained from this endeavor.

Many of the files are likely overwritten and impossible to access, but I know there must be a way to recover some files from the drive. Basically, I'mm looking for a freeware tool that can run on a mac and recover files from a reformatted/repartitioned NTFS volume. Music, movies, photos, documents, etc. We really don't care about the OS or the applications.

Seeing as I only have OSX, ubuntu, and a virtualized copy of windows 7 to work with, I don't really know what to do with this.

Has anyone used any OSX recovery tools on NTFS volumes successfully? Do you have any recommendations?

Not booting does not mean that all the files have been lost.

In first instance I suggest to take some precautions:

- Use under OS X Carbon copy to clone the disk to another drive and put that away.
- Take a windows install disk and after booting with Shift - F10 you can get to the command prompt
- Figure out the drive letter of the misbehaving drive and then go there
- do a "dir /s" command on the directories to see what's there and what's not. His files presumably sit under "Users"
- if there are plenty of files then you can copy those (inclusive the whole folder tree) with robocopy using the command prompt.

You may want to try this out first on another computer where there are backups.

There are two kind of people: Those who religiously backup and those who will. (in due time religiously backup)

edit: I just noticed that it was reformatted - shame on me. I still recommend first using carbon copy cloner before doing anything else, you'll have an identical copy to fall back on.

 

[mentaluproar]

The drive is hosed. Remo recover finds everything though in windows but it's not really a free app and it's slow as hell.

 

[MJL]

from another thread: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

ps recovery will normally be slow, but loosing all your files is worse....

ps2 normally a format is just overwriting the partition table and/or file allocation table and the data is actually still there but the table has to be rebuild. takes a lot of computing and time

 

[mentaluproar]

I've found a tool I love, Data Rescue 3. It's not free but is this thing works through all these bad blocks, and it looks like it may, I have no regrets buying it.

It's also pretty cool from a visual perspective.