Recovering old data from a cloned HDD

[mello_zd]

Hi, I've got a serious problem and I hope I can receive some useful advice here (sorry but my english isn't perfect).

I'll explain what my problem is:
Last week I've cloned a failing 640gb into a smaller 500gb without any problems. The notebook starts without any issue with the cloned drive and it's working ok. The 500gb cloned drive was previously the main drive of another notebook which had a number of files in it. Now I need to recover an MS Outlook file (pst) that was part of the pre-cloned 500gb hdd windows partition. My question is: is it possibile to recover something if the cloning process was not "sector by sector" or the only files i'll be able to find are the ones post-cloning procedure?

I hope that my question is clear (because of my poor english and because I know my situation is kinda strange) and that someone can help me figure this out. I really appreciate any kind of suggestions/help that you can give me.
Thank you all in advance

[pclab]

Since you have written files on your "donor" HDD, it will be terrible to get a big (I suppose it's big, PST files usually are...) file without corruption (if you can even get it...).
Try a scan with Rstudio for instance to see what comes up.

[digitalferret]

hi mello, it depends on what "failing" was, how you made the clone and with what?

if it's a file by file copy of the drive, the pst files should still be there if it was there (undeleted) on the original. (you say the system is working as it was before)

if the file had been deleted and you made a file by file clone to the new drive then you have problems as it would only copy current files and not unallocated space.

as PCLab mentions (if the file was deleted) you may be able to undelete but as the file is usually large then there may already be parts overwritten which will corrupt the file.
Similarly, on a sector by sector copy, File Carving would likely fail too due to file fragmentation and or overwritten parts.


You may, however, be able to recover the pst file from the original if you can access it from another PC running data recovery software.
This would depend on how stable the drive was, whether it's got bad sectors or it was just a software corruption that was preventing the drive from working.
If it was bad sectors i would have thought the cloning process would have locked up, so if it hasn't, you may be in luck, but again, if it had been deleted and if the unallocated space has been re used, then it's not looking so good.

As ever, if it's a critical thing, take the drive to a pro.

best of luck

[rogfanther]

The OP needs a file that was in the destination drive, before the cloning operation. My opinion is that there is a very low possibility of recovery of it.

@mello_zd, what was the software used to the cloning ?

[mello_zd]

Thank you all for your interest! Really appreciate!

@pclab Thanks for your suggestion, I'm doing that right now!

@rogfanther @digitalferret I used Acronis TrueImage for the cloning procedure. Standard clone, not sector-by-sector. The failing drive is not the one containing my file, it's just the one who got clone and replaced the files I want to recover. The disk itself it's in good condition and the PST file is small (under 100mb).

Thanks

[digitalferret]

thanks mello, my bad, re-reading i obviously misunderstood the question.
agree, v litle chance, but hey, give it a go.