Please help me, In a right state!

indierocker85

Heya

I had an issue with a laptop, I did what I thought was a *repair*, thinking all files would be put into an archive folder, and a clean version of Windows Vista would be installed, allowing me to boot.

However, it turned out either I made a sleepy mistake, or something, as I made a clean install (I definitely did not select format at any time, so it's very strange), and now all my files have gone from the hard drive. I am absolutely distraught as I have all my financial accounts on there for my business, countless other bits of work, as well as many GB of photos, including my wedding, honeymoon, family, holidays, etc.

I found a program called Stellar data professional, however it is only a trial, and they wanted £95 to actually recover anything, and apparently, the software isn't good at what it needs to do, according to the reviews. I found one called "EaseUS" however that again is only a free trial, and so far each time I use it, the computer keeps shutting off.

I am wondering if anybody can recommend a free or very cheap program, that will recover my files from the formatted drive. I am aware this is possible, as I have known of it before, however I didn't really know where to start myself.

This is so important to me, if anybody can help me, I would really really, really appreciate it. It has taken me 6 days of looking so far, at the end of my tether really!

Moneymaker

Erm, you don't have a backup drive? Or maybe your most important files on a memory stick?

rmg1

Have you tried Recuva (I believe it's free)?

jaydeeuk1

Recuva is one I've used before and rescued about 90% of files for the wife, who since has learnt her lesson and now has about 20000 different backups of everything including one in our companies fire proof safe.

There was another good one whose name escapes me, but also worked just as well for free.

Knarf44

Google Puran File Recovery, it's freeware for home users.

closed

explain exactly what you did, if you did a repair rather than a reinstall, something like http://www.voidtools.com/ might find the data

no point paying for recovery software, recuva (may need to run deepscan) does the same thing and is free. If you've overwritten the same portion of disk where the data was, it's gone forever. The more you use it, the less likely it is you'll get any data back


in future, backup to portable hard disk using macrium reflect free and burn your data to dvd, then you won't lose anything and have 3 copies should one fail . Moving data to an external drive as many people do carries a similar risk to having no backup.

indierocker85

No, because I am an idiot!

Moneymaker wrote: »

Erm, you don't have a backup drive? Or maybe your most important files on a memory stick?

indierocker85

I think I might have come across Recuva, but I can only recover 100mb, after that I have to pay. But I may consider paying for it if it's obviously going to work. Thanks

imho

Did you see the link Closed put on here post number 6.

NiftyDigits

indierocker85 wrote: »

I think I might have come across Recuva, but I can only recover 100mb, after that I have to pay. But I may consider paying for it if it's obviously going to work. Thanks

I was unaware that Recuva had any such limitation.

What size the install of Vista on your C: drive? How much space has been utilised?

You can try TestDisk

To whence will you save the 'recovered' data?

closed

recuva http://www.filehippo.com/download_recuva or something else