[pchelpers] Re: lost data

Hi PcCowboy

> Got into work this morning and found that our main computer with the message
> "Strike F1 no drive found"
> You do and it asks again and again.
> Took the drive out and put it into my bench computer.
> Bios sees it. XP sees it and wants to partition and format it.
> This is a 60 gig drive with a NTFS and 1 years worth of
> invoices. And the girls decided that they didn't need to burn
> no stinking backups. They back-up to the root drive. So all
> is lost.

Probably not, but it might cost more to get it back than it's worth to 
you. As far as i know, there are extreme differences both in quality and 
price among data recovery programs and companies. The best are able to 
recover data even from burned and broken hard drive pieces collected 
from the ocean floor, but the price in such a case is of course exorbitant.
The best is supposedly http://www.ibas.com/contact, but they only 
perform in-house recovery as far as i know. They do however promise free 
advice, so it doesn't hurt to call them. Before calling them, you might 
want to check this in case you don't know all these terms:
http://www.ibas.com/about/dictionary

http://datadepo.com/driveclinic.htm supposedly provides one of the best 
self-help programs (also for NTFS), but i would hesitate to call them a 
good company because they did rip me off in selling me a program that 
they knew wouldn't work (on a compacted HD).

> I ran 3 hard-drive tests programs and there is no problem
> with the drive.
> Except that it is empty!! No partitions no nothing.
> It is like someone came in and took out our drive and
> replaced it with a brand new one.
> 
> I tried Easy Recovery Pro 6. It didn't fine a thing not
> one bit of data on the drive. Even in RAW mode.
> 
> Then I tried R- Studio No file system to be found.
> 
> Then PC Inspector File recovery, it to couldn't find
> a file system.
> 
> I ran Easy Recovery Boot disc and after 5 hours and it
> found 2 files. Fil0.pcx  190mb big and Fil0.jpg  37mb big
> but couldn't recover them.

That sounds very promising. Call the vendor for help. Just make sure 
nothing writes anything on the drive. About how much data was on the drive?

Since the 3 programs you used so far all promise undelete ability, there 
is of course the remote possibility that some malware not only deleted 
but wrote over the deleted files. Supposedly the FBI/CIA and in that 
case also Ibas are able to undelete even that kind of stuff if it's only 
been overwritten once, but i don't know if that's more legend than fact.

Ekhart



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