Formatted/Reinstall Vista>XP>Vista recovery

[TerraNova]

Hi guys I need some help, I have a laptop which had Windows XP and had lots of documents and excel files, someday the Windows XP crashed and he took it to SONY Authorized dealer and reinstalled the OS with VISTA not knowing he has some data on the drive.

Now the data is retriveable i could see the original file names, but they are all corrupted.

Is there anyway of repairing those corrupted files, i have tried a few software but they were all had same results.

Any help much appreciated.

Thank you.

[falther]

Although I think there are members with higher knowledge - no one replied yet:

In my opinion - no way to retrieve data ... better - no way to expect reliable data.

I face it too often - (sorry for my clear words) - users switch on their brain too late.

Its like with old music cassette tapes - you rewind the tape and record a new set of music onto it. The previous music is gone - forever.

About 20 years ago - customers could sue the computer companies and complained in front of court "nobody told them to save data" and a lot of companies had to pay big money.
Today - even my nice with 8 years know about data saving.....

And an advice (out of my experience) everybody speaks about data saving - but no one about a quick and easy recovery of the COMPLETE system - including your data....
Software: Ghost, Acronis True Image, Drive Clone Pro etc.

[BlackST]

That's what DR is intended for...

[pepe]

Hi,

the 'corrupted' files probably got overwritten. To prove that U can use winhex, pick some files randomly and check if the space the old files used is used by files of the new installation.

pepe

[Nationwide DR]

Search for file headers for better results (raw data recovery)

[TerraNova]

Hi Pepe - Nationwide DR ,
I have tried raw recovery but it has same results like other recovery software, it has same corrupted data.

[dick]

I have a similar case here........In my case the customer repartioned the drive, made a 2nd bootable partition and installed windows xp. He originally ran a single 60gb partition which failed after a virus attack. Knowing he had about 10gb of data he used someting like Partition Magic to change the partition size to 11gb leaving the rest of the space for a 2nd bootable partition.

His was a huge mistake as he has overwritten and destroyed most of his important data. I can see the original folders and when I open them to look at the files they are all showing correctly with names, dates, attributes etc but most importantly nearly all of them show '0 bytes' these are the files that have been either partially or fully overwritten. Many of these damaged files do have some corrupted data in them.

Most of the files I need are MS Word files and I would presume some incomplete data could still be recovered from a few of them by manually repairing each individual file. I don't think its really worth trying to do this with 100's of files. About 5% of the word files appear to still be intact and thats about as much the customer can hope for.

[beto]

Hy terranova the data was overwritted by new code , by this reason even on RAW searching u got bad documents, there are not a physical way to retrieve the bit´s "1 " to "0 " or viceversa unfortunely

Regards

[beto]

one time i read some document´s , where´s clamed its possible not to return the value, its possible by algorithm got the "remained" and from the remained calculate, the original, because the heads not write always "0" or " 1" write "0.xxxx" or "1.xxx" because are mechanical piece´s and there are not always 100% of precision, , let me find that document and i would post that info .

[beto]

i got it one, im going to put the link on technology section

[TerraNova]

I have tried Winhex and apparently the space has been occupied by the OS as stated by pepe.

thank's again, maybe no hope of getting the data intact.