Laptop was stolen and thief re-installed windows. Laptop was recovered and owner desires to scan system for any recoverable .jpg photos. Expecations are not high because they could have been wiped already, but need to try.

Planning to use PhotoRec on a system rescue CD (Gentoo LINUX boot disc) to scan the disc for any recoverable .jpg files. Any suggestions are appreciated: especially if you have significant experience. Thank you.

I'm sure you'll get lots of suggestions for this case - here are some from me...

As I see it, your choices include free tools (like PhotoRec, Recuva etc.) and free trials of paid tools (like R-Studio, GetDataBack etc.), where you can't save the recovered files until you buy the software. There are dozens of such programs.

Different tools give different (better/worse) results, in different cases - so you are only limited by how much time (how many different programs) you want to try.

Of course, as I'm sure you already know, don't write anything more (including recovery software) onto the drive which you want to recover from.

(You haven't mentioned which "new" Windows version which was installed. If the drive had a full format when installing Win7 or Win Vista, then everything from before that format will be unrecoverable.)

Good luck!

You can also use an hex tool to check visually if unallocated space is really wiped or not.

OK, but why did you start two threads with the same topic?
stolen-laptop-was-reimaged-thief-t20765.html

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