Anyone play with any data recovery tools?

Long story short- A Windows update screwed my MBR last week and I made an error trying to recover it. I should have whacked it with ERD Commander right off to recover the files but like an idiot I tried the "restore MBR" option in the XP recovery console and made it worse I think.

ERD Commander doesn't see any files with or without the MBR being in place and Spin-Rite doesn't either (opention #2 data recovery) however in the Spin-rite raw data snapshot you can clear see that there is data on the drive.

I have set the drive aside so that I can work on it as time permits and try to recover what I need when the correct tool presents itself.

Nothing earthshaking was lost, just a years worth of mail which I'd like back but not mission critical...

endo wrote on 12.09.09 at 15:49:31:


I assume this runs from a boot disc?

A not-so funny aside- This is the second time I have had to setup the machine in 3 days!

I made the mistake of clicking on a link leading to a torrent site and my (fully patched) machine was INSTANTLY hit with drive-by trogan/spyware code.

I mean the page wasn't even fully loaded and I was franticlly hitting the back button (as soon as I hit the link I knew I made a mistake and hit back) and it closed the browser out and rebooted the machine!

When it restarted the firewall had been shut off and there was a flashing "microsoft icon" flashing in the tray telling me I was infected and had to download "x" software to cure the problem.

I blew away the harddrive with a hard low level format and reloaded everything and deleted the links from my backed up favorites.

Never saw anything that fast before, I had the DSL modem shut down before the attack had even finished shutting my OS though so what ever did it was out of luck reporting anything home.

Hi

I use a Boot disc CD called, "MultiBoot EmergencyCD ver. Jul 2oo9"
It includes a LOT of programs to diagnose and correct any system problems you may have.  It has saved my bacon on several occasions.

CD Contents:

* miniPE v2k5.o9.o3 ( 24 Jul 2oo9 )
* Hiren's BootCD 9.9
* QuickTech Pro
* CheckIt 7.1 Pro - test, benchmark hardware
* SpinRite 6.0 HD Maintenance & Recovery Tool
* OnTrack Data Advizor 5.oo
* OnTrack EasyRecovery 6.10
* Acronis Disk Director Server 1o.o.2169
* Acronis True Image Echo Server with UR 9.7.8344
* Active BootDisk 2.1o
* HDD Regenerator 1.71
* EuroSoft PC-Check 6.o5
* Memtest86+ 2.11

Good luck!  

/Edit:  SpinRite is the best hard drive tool out there.

Torrents should be a last resort IMHO.  There are much faster and reliable sources.

ps47 wrote on 12.09.09 at 21:51:29:


Mininova.

gdonovan wrote on 12.09.09 at 17:09:10:

wow.I have considered mininova as one of the safest-but I admit I haven't been there for a while,as I download stuff only rarely (basically only if I can't get it anywhere else)..maybe they got hit by a hacker or something.

anyway,good luck with the data recovery.

paulpsomiadis wrote on 13.09.09 at 05:32:22:


I'll try it today.

EDIT- Running now.

Question- So far nothing has been able to crack this, I have even gone as far as to take the drive and assign it a drive letter and mark the partition as active.

However.

The drive is being marked as '"0" in size and I assume it would have to be formatted.

If quick format is chosen, in theory the data isn't touch just marked as not being there. I'm thinking if the drive shows a size then spin rite or another program might be able to undelete or recover the data.

Thoughts?