Data recovery after formatting and reinstalling OS

[MaciekH]

Hi guyz,

I'm struggling with data (photo) recovery from my friend's laptop. She asked me for reinstalling her OS for new Win7 so I did it.
There was only one big (ca 300 GB) partition before, so during installation I've deleted this big one, and created two instead. Smaller one (50GB) just for OS and bigger one (ca 250 GB) for other files. Everything was OK until she told me that there ware many important photos on this drive and she "need" it back.

I've taken drive off the laptop and plugged it in to my laptop via USB adapter. I've been doing some recovers before so I'm quite familiar with proper software.

I've used GetDataBack for NTFS to scan this drive and I managed to recover 6 GB of photos but I can't open any of them.
There are only JPG files, seems like a proper size (between 2 and 5 MB), they've got proper names (like straight from camera) and folders.

I've tried already to fix those JPGs using JPEG Recovery but without any results:/ Maybe I recovered them wrong?

Now I'm scanning this drive again using DMDE 2.2.2 software It's looking for any NTFS volumes and has found 191 different so far:/ and it's only 9% (2 hours) of whole process.


Each NTFS volume contains different files (I've tried this soft and different, smaller drifve before) and I hope I will find at least a couple of those photos on one of them but my question is:

How to cope with so many volumes to look trough? Should I look for any specific one and recover from it?
Maybe You know some ways of recovering JPG files?

The drive is 320 GB Seagate ST9320320AS (298 GB avaialble) if it matters.

Any advices would be appreciated!

Cheers!

[quasimodo]

DMDE is a great tool, but to be able to fully benefit from it's functionality it requires some deep understanding of the NTFS file structure. Your best and quickest solution would be to run a raw recovery for JPEG's and other photo files that you need. It will not recover the folder structure or the original names, but the pictures themself should be intact.

[Dizidago357]

MaciekH,

More often than not, Windows 7 (and Vista) clear out most, if not all, of a drive during an install of the OS. You may get lucky and be able to tinker around and find some stuff though. If you're not wanting to search each and every possible partition (can't say I blame you) might I suggest a program called Photorec? It is free and open source, allowing carving for many predefined file types (including pictures).

Best Luck,

Dizi

[lcoughey]

These types of scenarios are so nasty, we just charge for the recovery of everything we can get off the drive...no guarantees that we will recover what the client is looking for. Basically, we pass the risk over to the client...it has saved a lot of headaches since we implemented this policy on overwritten drives.

[Dizidago357]

Luke,

While that is a fine solution if the client is okay with it (we follow a similar practice on these issues), what if the client needs a bunch of pictures (say one or two thousand), and you only recover 50? Do you still charge the full rate, or do you discount the recovery slightly? We try to discount somewhat since it's only fair, but usually don't knock off more than 20-30% of the cost. Just curious what other places do in this scenario.

Dizi

[lcoughey]

Luke,

While that is a fine solution if the client is okay with it (we follow a similar practice on these issues), what if the client needs a bunch of pictures (say one or two thousand), and you only recover 50? Do you still charge the full rate, or do you discount the recovery slightly? We try to discount somewhat since it's only fair, but usually don't knock off more than 20-30% of the cost. Just curious what other places do in this scenario.

Dizi

Basically, we say quote a price...say $500. For that price, we will recover anything and everything we can off that drive. There might be no data or all their data recovered...most likely something in between.

We've moved to this way of quoting for these projects because too many times we would spend days scanning a 2TB drive and recover lots of data and not get 100% of the data...the client would expect a discount, even though it takes the same amount of effort by us. We also had issues where we would recover hundreds of GB and the client would say that they aren't going to pay unless their PST file works. So, now we pass the risk to them.

If the data isn't worth them making the risk, why should I risk it? I'm not the one who didn't back up my data and I'm not the one who overwrote the data.

It sounds mean...but we have been burned too many times with this type of project.