No, you're going to need another drive to restore to.
Drive recovery software won't overwrite any data like that (which technically doing what you suggest would be overwriting the files) because the whole point of drive recovery software is to be non destructive.
So there is no way to just rebuild whatever index is flagging the files as 'not deleted'/location?
Deletion isn't really a flag like that. It's likely that your drive's file system metadata got corrupted somehow. The recovery software can read the contents of the disk, but can't know what the metadata originally was. In any case, even if it could, it wouldn't write data to the drive for safety reasons. You're going to have to recover the data to some empty space somewhere else.
Also you can use the new drive you're probably going to need to create a backup of the data. Because the first problem here is that all of this data only lived in one spot and if it is important enough that you need to recover it than it is important enough that there should be at least 2 copies of it anyway.
Also you can use the new drive you're probably going to need to create a backup of the data. Because the first problem here is that all of this data only lived in one spot and if it is important enough that you need to recover it than it is important enough that there should be at least 2 copies of it anyway.
One or more physical backups, and a cloud backup. Use your provider of choice.
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Drive recovery software won't overwrite any data like that (which technically doing what you suggest would be overwriting the files) because the whole point of drive recovery software is to be non destructive.
Deletion isn't really a flag like that. It's likely that your drive's file system metadata got corrupted somehow. The recovery software can read the contents of the disk, but can't know what the metadata originally was. In any case, even if it could, it wouldn't write data to the drive for safety reasons. You're going to have to recover the data to some empty space somewhere else.
One or more physical backups, and a cloud backup. Use your provider of choice.
In the meantime, any recommendations on the best free recovery software? (that works on vista 64bit).
Cnet/Download.com not been good for a long while now, afraid they will have too many toolbars/malware/adware/etc. built into the 'free' trials.
That's also not how any of that really works.
You really just need an actual backup of the data.