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Author: Subject: Folder recovery
splitrivet

posted on 13/5/04 at 04:40 PM Reply With Quote
Folder recovery

Hey up chasps today I managed to delete about 5 gigs of info from a folder ,yes I know I should have backed it up anyone know any good software to recover it tried Norton utilities which got a little bit back but that was it.
Any help gratefully received before I start looking for the nearest bridge to jump off.
Cheers,
Bob





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flak monkey

posted on 13/5/04 at 04:51 PM Reply With Quote
Try these:

http://www.ontrack.co.uk/freesoftware/freesoftware.asp

they are freeversions of some sophisticated software. There is alot about them on the products pages. Read and see if any of them will do what you need...its worth a try anyway...

Cheers,
David





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pbura

posted on 13/5/04 at 05:22 PM Reply With Quote
Hope you're not still using the computer!

I was cleaning up my HD, and mistakenly hard-deleted my WordPerfect document directory. Four years of correspondence gone! I could, uh, do a little better with backups

So I downloaded a recovery program and guess what? The new proggie install over-wrote the 'freed' space Should have known better.

Pete





Pete

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Peteff

posted on 13/5/04 at 05:35 PM Reply With Quote
I have a disk with some utilities on it. One of them is called driverescue and it is mainly for damaged drives but it finds deleted folders. I could try emailing the folder with it in if your email was up.





yours, Pete

I went into the RSPCA office the other day. It was so small you could hardly swing a cat in there.

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stephen_gusterson

posted on 13/5/04 at 06:37 PM Reply With Quote
the more you use your computer, the more the file space that was occupied by the files, will be reused and files lost

you need to sort it asap before they are permanently overwritten

atb

steve






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JoelP

posted on 13/5/04 at 06:41 PM Reply With Quote
police (forensic scientist anyway) can find files that have been overwritten 20 times... hence deletion software that overwrites stuff many times to aviod it being found.






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stephen_gusterson

posted on 13/5/04 at 06:51 PM Reply With Quote
I dont understand that.

Files are stored on a disk by changing magnetic particles on the surface, to make a 0 or 1 thats read by the head. Once its changed, how can you 'see' what used to be there? It cant be a little bit of a 1 and a little bit of a 0?


When files are deleted, all the system does is to take the entry out of the file allocation table, and remove the first letter of the file name. Also, files are not stored in one peice - they are stored in random blocks, linked together by the file system. So, if middle blocks of a file are used by summat else, you lose the whole file.

The file itself isnt actually deleted

You can recover files by looking for the old truncated file name, and putting it back into the file allocation table.

Id be interested to know how a hard disk magnetic particle can store current, and old data...... cos I dont think it can be done....


atb

steve

[Edited on 13/5/04 by stephen_gusterson]






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flak monkey

posted on 13/5/04 at 07:04 PM Reply With Quote
I think it finds fragments of the old files...maybe and thats enough for forensics to piece things together... If the files have just been recently deleted then it would be possible to recover the whole file...but not if it has been written over fully i wouldnt have thought...

I never understood how that works...

David





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JoelP

posted on 13/5/04 at 07:37 PM Reply With Quote
believe it or not steve, it isnt actually completely digital! the magnetic moment is just shifted up of down sufficiently to make it read correct, but there is a lot of information to be had from how north or south the bit actually is.

lots of info on this site:

http://www.pcplus.co.uk/tips/default.asp?articleid=18167&page=1&pagetypeid=4&subsectionid=390



i may be wrong about 20 times, it says 7 on that link. but my bro always assumed it was seven, and told me one day that he'd turned the deletor up to 20 cos of something he'd read somewhere...

paranoid bugger, eh?!

[Edited on 13/5/04 by JoelP]






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Peteff

posted on 13/5/04 at 07:39 PM Reply With Quote
Writing 0's to the entire drive renders it unreadable. This is not like formatting. I've done it to a couple of old drives which were junked and they are now working again. Manufacturers websites are a good source of tools for drive recovery if you like to play around with stuff. As long as the drive can be recognised in bios you have a chance. If you use Spybot it has a tool called secure shredder which changes the bit pattern of a file as well as deleting it to make it more difficult to recover. It recommends you shred files 5 times to render them unrecoverable.

[Edited on 13/5/04 by Peteff]





yours, Pete

I went into the RSPCA office the other day. It was so small you could hardly swing a cat in there.

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Hellfire

posted on 13/5/04 at 10:11 PM Reply With Quote
So if you format your HD does it wipe the information totally?






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flak monkey

posted on 13/5/04 at 10:15 PM Reply With Quote
No formatting just wipes the master file table and the MBR (master boot record)....

To get rid of all the info on your hard drive you have to use one of the deletion software pakages that you can get.... McAffe do one called shredder, and there are many others out there.

Cheers,
David





Sera

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liam.mccaffrey

posted on 13/5/04 at 10:19 PM Reply With Quote
recover my files

use this utility it is really good I used it to recover a friends coursework from a floppy disc, it had been overwritten aswell. it is really good and warns you not to install the software on to the drive you are trying to recover from
recover my files

[Edited on 14/5/04 by liam.mccaffrey]





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splitrivet

posted on 14/5/04 at 01:40 PM Reply With Quote
Thanks for the input fellas been away from the office so unable to reply, guess I'll lose some of the files but getting most of em back would be a bonus.
My email Pete is roberttwd@aol.com,liam that link dont seem to work mate, Downloading that ontrack software at the moment David thanks a lot I'll let you know how I get on.
Cheers,
Bob





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liam.mccaffrey

posted on 14/5/04 at 06:12 PM Reply With Quote
that link works now

sorry, here it is





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Digger Barnes

posted on 14/5/04 at 08:43 PM Reply With Quote
I have used the ontrack software after a serious virsus attack a few years ago. It is fantastic (but requires or a least it used to require some knowledge of dos)

[Edited on 14/5/04 by Digger Barnes]

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malcolmstoddart

posted on 15/5/04 at 08:24 PM Reply With Quote
can't tell you how to restore folders but a surefire way of removing everything on a hard drive is to strap it to an induction motor at work for 72hours and there is (apparently) nothing that will recover it..
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