Data Recovery for our Church computer

[meechy]

Greetings

My problem is this, I am a student at Heald college working on my Network Systems Admin degree. The Church I attend doesn't have a full time IT guy, just one of the guys who more like a hobbiest. The problem is, that their main computer stopped booting into XP. Once it got to splash screen it would freeze up, even in safemode. They called me, because I have helped some of the single moms at church upgrade their computers.

I find out the partition table is either corrupt or data is damaged, my best guess. So I take the drive, hook it to my own, move over all the important file and burn to DVD, so I thought. Take it back and do a reinstall hoping to get it up and running. That really didn't work. In the All users folders there are two folders I can't get access to Financial and the Teresa, Access Denied. Thinking I had everthing on DVD backed up I just format the HDD and do fresh install. The guy who set up their network finishes up. two days later Oct 2 I get a call saying those two folder are not on the DVD Financial and Teresa and they contain all of the church's financial info.

Is it possible to recover that DATA that was formatted over or are they basically screwed? I will be there tonight trying to use a recovery program, but I really could use use some serious help.

Sorry for the long post, wanted to make sure that you had the full story.

 

[pkroks]

yeah you can. go and download Get Data Back for NTFS/FAT32 depending on the file system. I formated my harddrive a while back and forgot to move some stuff off of it. It recovered it all. The only problem with that program is you have to licence it to save the files again. Otherwise i believe its the best available for download. Get it here

Just went there, they got some other cool stuff... :grinthumb

 

[PanicX]

Get that hard drive out of the machine immediately!

In all likelyhood you've already overwritten this data and it will not be recoverable. First thing you'll want to do is slave the drive and scan it with a recovery utility like GetDataBack or Ontracks EasyRecovery Pro.

If you can't find the data, you'll need to look up your phonebook(or local directory listing) for a data recovery company that can restore overwritten data. It won't be cheap (at least $500, but probably more than $1000). If they can't do anything, then your SOL.

 

[meechy]

Ok, pulling the HDD and taking it home to work on with my pc. I tested that Get Data recovery at work, but it didn't find any of my recent deleted files, it did pull up stuff from Sept 04. Any other advice beside trying it hooked up as a slave. I checked with a local recovery company, $100 evaluation and up to $5000 if they can recover the data. Trust me when I say I will be on here tomorrow, perminently, hope you guys are around.

 

[pkroks]

another good program is Recover My Files. It lets you choose wat kind of recovery. so for your problem, you would choose format recover.

maybe it never picked up the files coz they had passwords? its a guess

 

[DelJo63]

lesson learned?

meechy write:

Thinking I had everthing on DVD backed up I just format the HDD and do fresh install. The guy who set up their network finishes up. two days later Oct 2 I get a call saying those two folder are not on the DVD Financial and Teresa and they contain all of the church's financial info.​

Boy this is painful! You depend upon the backup and find it's not viable.
This is a lesson for everyone that has critical data that you depend upon;

It's not good enough to just create backup - - you have to test them once in a while to make sure you can get it back.​

Sorry to hear you have been bitten by Murphy (if it can go wrong, it will).

 

[Merc14]

Check out PC Inspector File Recovery. It got my data back after a partition got deleted. http://www.convar.com/default.asp It has a recover from a quick format function. I don't think it will recover a from a full format + install of new OS though. It's free so it won't hurt to try.