Data Recovery

clsCorwin

So after a botched Solaris install which overwrote a good deal of Windows, all of my wifes pictures are lost once I've reinstalled. I've tried some freeware stuff, but with mixed results. Any really good software you can recommend me?

lunchbox12682

Since you're trying to install Solaris, I am assuming you have some *nix experience.
I've had decent luck with some of the Linux Live CDs. Knoppix or Ubuntu should work.
Saved my ass more than once.

clsCorwin

Its more like, I've played around with it many years ago, but since Sun kindly send me a Solaris Dev Kit, I'll play with it more now.

Specifics would be good.

RoundBoy

The first thing is to stop spinning this as the primary drive and installing anything else. Hopefully the information you lost was not overwritten by a solaris partition.

You need to find the nature of the lost pics. were they deleted ala 'recycle bin' (allowed to be overwritten) or was the partition they were on overwrote / removed ?

I accidentally deleted & formatted a partition i wanted to keep, and some free sw i found online helped me recover it. Google search helps there, as i forgot the name.

if you removed the partition, formatted, overwrote with data.. then you just might me SOL... and I have no idea.

wrong_button

Like roundboy said, stop using that disc as your primary. Once those files are overwritten, it's pretty much game over - unless you want to drop a crapton of cash sending it off to a cleanroom.

I've had good luck where I work using a program called Recover4All on hard drives, flash drives/cards, etc. Decent recovery rate, pretty intuitive to use, and you can run it from a floppy to minimize the chances of overwriting.

Good thing: You can download the unregistered version (at www.recover4all.com) and it will tell you what files are recoverable.
Not so great thing: It will only allow you to recover like the first 10k or something. To register and actually extract the files it's going to cost $69 for a license, so depends how badly you want those photos back. Or how forgiving your wife is. ;-)

Good luck, man.

lunchbox12682

As a follow up to my previous, I've used Knoppix in the past when I changed a Windows drive from static to dynamic or some weird crap in XP. For some reason windows decided it didn't recognize the word it had just done to itself. I booted up Knoppix and was able to transfer everything of value to an external USB drive. I was luck in that the HD was still recognized as NTFS. If you did something similar or only blew away the MBR or something, this option could work. And it's obviously free.

If you screwed up the partition table, then try the other suggestions.