A customer brought me a computer for fix. He said that his hard drive was partitioned into C: and D: and all of a sudden, the files in D: drive were gone. Only one folder had remained. My client thought he just lost 160GB of data. This seemed to be caused by some kind of viruses deleting files on your hard drive.
FreeUndelete, TOKIWA DataRecovery, Pandora Recovery and Restoration
In this case, I tried a number of free data recovery software in the attempt to recover as much data as possible for my client. The software I tried were FreeUndelete, TOKIWA DataRecovery, Pandora Recovery and Restoration. I have actually used Restoration for a few times before. However, I didn’t like its interface and the lack of restoring the file and folder structures. This is why I searched for other data recovery software this time.
Pandora Recovery Came Through
Among the software I have mentioned, all of them were able to find the files on my client’s hard drive. Most of the files were still there. However, FreeUndelete, TOKIWA DataRecovery and Restoration had crashed a number of times when I was trying to recover the files by copying them to another hard drive. Most of the time the crashes happened when there is a non-English filename or the file size is too large. Only Pandora Recovery was working properly and recovered the files. Also, only Pandora Recovery was able to keep the folder structure so it gave less headache to my client.
However, there is one disadvantage on Pandora Recovery which is the lack of FAT32 support. It can only read NTFS formatted drives. For FAT32, I had to use Restoration instead. So I would strongly recommend you to convert your drive to NTFS if your OS supports it.
After recovering most of the files, I ran a virus scan on the C: drive using NOD32. It found over a hundred files infected. To play safe, I suggested my customer to format and reinstall Windows just to make sure the system is clean.
Stop, Off and Call
If your files are suddenly gone and you are sure you have done nothing to them, then you should immediately turn of your computer to prevent the problem to expand. You should then immediately find a data recovery expert to help you recover your data. Do not write any files onto the drive as doing so will decrease the chance of recovering your data.
- STOP - stop doing anything on your computer
- OFF - turn your computer off
- CALL - call a data recovery expert for help
Do you have any success on using other data recovery software? Please share them with us!
crashed hard drive recovery…
Good post. I am looking into these issues on my blog….
[…] could not be scanned. Then I tried to use the Pandora Recovery, which I have discussed about it here. However, because the drive was not accessible, Pandora Recovery was not able to scan it for […]
Humph. Someone has to force me to read this post. It’s too big and boring. Brevity is the sister of talent, remember that.