Laptop was stolen and theif attempted reformat; need help recovering files.
7 replies, posted
As the title says, my laptop was recently stolen, and apparently the thief tried to install Windows 7 over my other partitions. I can't boot into my windows partition (it says the partition table is damaged), and when I booted into ubuntu to check the files in the windows partition, I found that the C:/Users folder was gone.
After that initial check (when I was at the police station), for some reason I now can no longer access the windows partition; I can see it, but when I click on it nothing happens.
I had some important documents in that folder, including schoolwork. I would immensely appreciate if anyone could help me recover it.
Edit:
If it make any difference, it appears to still have the same disk usage it had before, despite Users (~80 gigs) being gone.
Maybe try [URL="http://www.piriform.com/recuva"]Recuva?[/URL]
Not 100% sure if it will work, but it's worth a try I guess?
I can only boot into linux right now, but I did try testdisk and ntfsundelete to scan for deleted files. They both found thousands (pretty sure the same thousands, though), but I couldn't find the files I cared about (mainly the main.cpp of a project I was working on).
Mostly it was a bunch of temporary internet files. I'm wondering whether the stuff I'm looking for would even be found by these undeleters; like I said, the disk still shows nearly full usage.
There's 80 gigs of missing files, I would think at least one picture or video file would be found, but I didn't see any.
I've had luck with this:
[url]http://www.partition-recovery.com/[/url]
The LiveDVD is a bit cumbersome, but it works wonders in recovering files.
Or use gparted and repartion your drive from ubuntu, then reinstall windows.
Recuva is your best bet. If that doesn't pick up the files, then you're screwed. You should have any important files backed up
Googled it a bit, I have never used this software but I'll quote some of the post I found the link from.
[url]http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download[/url]
[QUOTE=TheLinuxSRC]I could not agree more. Just last week I had a designer friend who accidentally deleted the partition his portfolio was on. We tried to recover the partition however the MFT had become lost/corrupted.
My first attempt to recover his data was with ntfsundelete, however it did not recognize the partition at all. I next used Disk Internals NTFS Recovery program (Commercial) with the same results.
Finally, I Googled a bit and found the testdisk/photorec package and used that. It took about 40 hours to recover ~225GB data. It was unable to recover filenames, however it did create new directories for each directory it found and recreated the files in those directories, albeit with arbitrary names. Most impressively it did recreate the files with the proper file name extensions. With some creative perl scripting I could have even renamed some of these files based on meta data in the files. This was not necessary in my case.[/quote]
[url]http://beta.slashdot.org/story/119659[/url]
I hope you can recover your files and I'm sorry to hear that an idiot stole your computer :(
This should certainly be a lesson learned too, might be worth storing your important work on Dropbox or Google Drive. :rolleyes:
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