Here's the claim:
"Our powerful, yet easy to use, data recovery tools are designed not only to undelete accidentally deleted files or partitions but also recover your data with GetDataBack after fdisk, formatting your drive, power failure, virus attack, software failure, or after deleting files, folders or partitions."
Here's the claimer: http://www.runtime.org/
I have no experience of this software so cannot give a recommendation.
Good luck
Rallyette, Dusty
I own Runtime's Get data back and can tell you that it is as good as it claims to be. If you used the software before you did the restore, you probably would have recovered 100% of the data. But, you did overwrite a lot of data when you did the restore. And ... unlike what you may see on NCIS, much of your data is undoubtedly gone forever. Lets assume for a minute that you had 25GB of data on the drive before the restore, and the restore put 10 GB back on the drive. In that case appx. 40 % was overwritten immediately. The more you use the drive the more that will be overwritten.
1. Stop using the computer. Windows is constantly writing Temp and other files to the hard drive and destroying more data.
2. On another computer, download the GetDataBack for Fat or NTFS depending on the partition type. I see that you did tell us NTFS.
Install the software. You do not need to purchase it to run the software. You can do the recovery and view it and decide afterward whether or not to purchase it.
DO NOT install the software on your Mom's computer. You should remove the HD from Mom's computer and hook it up as slave the the other computer. Get a friend to help if you have never done that before.
Start the computer and GetDataBack and run the recovery. Save Step 1 results to the Other computers HD or to another partition on Mom's HD if there is a second partition. NEVER write anything to the drive you are trying to recover!
Proceed with Step 2 & 3 and save the results. (The recovery takes a few hours, but once it is saved, you can return to it quickly.)
Brouse the recovery tree looking particularly at the folders with the assigned names(all numbers and letters) The folders with the good names are probably the ones put there during the recovery. Your old data will not be there. It will be in the recovered folders with the weird looking names.
Or instead of brousing the recovery tree, you can do a search for *.jpg Most of the pictures will no doubt have the JPG extension. You can view the pictures with any viewer on the host computer, and decide whether you found anything of value, but you cannot copy them without purchasing the software.
If there are a lot of recovered pictures, you will want to buy the software. If there are only a few, you can actually recover them without purchasing the program by doing a Save as from the picture program you are using to view the pictures.
I wish I could tell you that you will get most of the pictures back, but realistically, you likely will get only a small percentage back. But hey, 25% or so is worth the effort, right?
Use Dusty's link and give it a shot. And let us know.
