Recovering HD contents

[mlweber]

I had my hard drive on my desktop accidentally started on a system restore. It ran for only about 5 seconds then i shut the computer off. I took my harddrive out and put it into my roommates desktop as a slave to see if i could recover some files. The hard drive shows up as completely empty. Does the system restore really wip eeverything out that fast and is there any way to get that information back? I have a final project on there that is due in 4 days. Any help appreciated.

 

[Cybelex]

Most of the contents of the drive are still there. The first thing to try is partition recovery. If a proper partition table can be written to the drive, you can then access the files that remain normally. Testdisk or Testdisk Boot Floppy Image is the best tool for that. It will not damage your files no matter what options you choose and it often requires some intelligent guessing. If it finds a partition that is close to the size it should be, write the changes to disk and then reboot. See if the drive is accessible. If not, try again. If you get nowhere with it (and that would be very unusual), then try scanning the drive with recovery software.

Free recovery applications:

Diskinternals Recovery Boot CD
Pandora Recovery (Free for personal use)
Smart Data Recovery
Recover Files
Recuva
Restoration
Free Undelete (NTFS only
Softperfect File Recovery
ADRC Data Recovery Tools
Undelete Plus
Data Recovery
PCI File Recovery
DriveRescue
Ultimate Data Recovery
Disk Investigator

Commercial:

O&O Disk Recovery
Paragon Mount Everything (Mounts any file system, CD/DVD burning, File Manager, Partitioner)
GetDataBack (For FAT or NTFS)
Ontrack EasyRecovery Pro
File Scavenger
Recover My Files
RecoverPlus Pro
Zero Assumption Recovery
Active@ File Recovery
Final Recovery
Recover4All Professional
Easeus Data Recovery Wizard
NTFS Recovery