• Used Symantec Ghost, can I recover lost data?
    6 replies, posted
So I used the built-in factory restore setting on an old Dell XPS 400 yesterday which was contaminated by viruses and a nearly unusable WinXP installation, right after backing up about 55gbs of data from a while back. It used Symantec Ghost to factory restore the system, but about halfway through the restore I cringed when I remembered I had left some more recent (and possibly important) shit that I moved to its shared documents folder to free up space on my laptop's tiny hard drive. After the reinstall, I quickly installed a free data recovery tool to see if I could salvage anything but it was only displaying folders that I have on my hard drive right now. Same thing with another tool. This morning, I decided to research Ghost because I honestly had no clue what the fuck it was. Discovered that it was an HDD cloning tool, so it basically reinstalled the computer from an image. Does this mean it pretty much cleared the free space on the HDD too, or are some files still recoverable somehow?
You should have hit cancel. I hear it works, just ask FatFatFatty.
No. Because Ghost is a sector-by-sector image capture program, it will copy a sector when making an image. And will apply to a sector when applying an image. Depending on when you cut out the imaging, you'll have to do a data scrape. Traditional "undeletes" may not work.
Recuva is a good program, assuming the file was not over written.
Failing that if the data is really worth it, and you've got the money, you can contact data recovery specialists.
[QUOTE=SSBMX;28384533]Recuva is a good program, assuming the file was not over written.[/QUOTE] Most of the NTFS, partition, and bootsector information will be lost at the first percent in a ghosting. Recuva will have a hard time recovering the data. [editline]2nd March 2011[/editline] [QUOTE=cdlink14;28386114]Failing that if the data is really worth it, and you've got the money, you can contact data recovery specialists.[/QUOTE] Its about $1200 to recover data from a 150GB HDD. prices will of course vary, but most will now do a evaluation. Since most data recoveries charge by the size of the drive, not the amount of data on it. Should be about $50-70 for an evaluation. Go for this if they offer it, because this way you're not stuck with a $1200 bill, and no data.
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testdisk[/url] I'm no expert but I came across this a few days ago and it could help, but it's pretty similar to Recuva I think.
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