My sister got on my computer and deleted everything off my hard drive. I caught her in the middle of doing this. She was getting ready to reinstall Windows but had not yet done that. She is in high school and 2 years older than me. She did this on purpose and now I do not know what to do. I looked at my hard drive and it is a 330 gig Maxtor. I had just enough money to buy another hard drive so that I would not do any further damage to the Maxtor. A friend did a scan but it only showed 20,000 files. I know that I have more like 200,000 files or more. I set the new drive up with Windows and looked online. I can find alot of "free" scan programs that will look at the drive. I did a scan from one of them and it showed about 60,000 files, but alot of them appear to be incomplete from the preview, or damaged. I also did not see anything in the scan list about my programs like Photoshop. Does a recovery just get my pics, text, Word documents back? Can anyone tell me where to go to get the best recovery program?

Kimberly

Also, I am confused as to what can be recovered. I read that almost everything can be recovered but does that mean my internet Favorites list, my game programs, my drawings and autocad work, or just pictures and documents?

you have one mean sister. if you don't want to take this case to a pro then all you can do is try different software tools that are available.

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Zero Alpha: zeroalpha.com.au
Find Cheap Donor Drives App: https://www.zeroalpha.com.au/donor-drive-app Updated February 2026

Well Kimberly,

Perhaps you are in the wrong place, unless your sister dropped the HD or took the top off it.

with the right software you stand a good chance of getting back most of your items, as long as you have not continued to save files to the drive, or re-installed the OS.

When you "delete" things they don't actually get "deleted" just hidden , BUT if the drive is continually used and the directory entries written over , it becomes far more difficult in that you must try and hunt through the "unused" areas on the hard disk for your missing items.

I would just get your sisters mobile phone and text all her boyfriends saying she has herpes.

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Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Article 19

If your sister simply deleted the partition on the disk that's relatively easy to recover from (though if you don't already have a good partition-management program the only free ones immediately available may be Linux-based). If she deleted individual files while running the system (you might want to password-protect it in the future) they may still be mostly recoverable if you install another system on your new drive to work from (do not do anything that would write anything to the drive that you want to recover).

http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-fr ... tility.htm is one place you can learn a bit about recovery options.