Something I should know, but I'm having brainfade

[ElsaBorzoi]

My friend Denise has an external hard drive, but she also has a 14 year old.
Denise's husband is a sysadmin (OK, a backup admin), so she is more tech savy than your average home user. She had her 160 GB external drive about three quarters full, mostly pictures that she wanted to keep, so they were backed up to her external drive, because her PC was so crashy she was going to reformat her internal hard drive. And yes, yours truly had some equally precious files on that hard drive as well. Then Teenager had to use the computer for something. (Now please note: I am NOT dissing all teenagers; I repect the hell out of you guys here, for I know that most of you probably know a heck of a lot more than me, lol; this guy is a gamer, and THINKS he knows things, but he does not. He is not real tech savy at all.) All of a sudden, all of the files on the hard drive were wiped. Everything appears to be gone, so it looks like he reformatted the hard drive. I know it was originally formatted as FAT32;now Properties says that the file system is Unknown. I know there are forensic tools out there, but the 'Zoi here is looking for a job, so is poor right now. Do any of you dudes know right off hand if anything is recoverable? My crap isn't as important as those pictures.

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Thank you for your time,
Els

[p99]

Find all the data recovery programs you can. I'm mostly against cd key piracy but hey, if your files are at stake there are plenty of windows recovery programs and even more websites that offer the keys for them.

Let the program run and when it is finished you can get back most of your files. Assumming the kid didn't format the dirve 20 times. If it was formatted once I can almost guarentee a near full recovery of files. You may need another drive to transfer them onto untill you can reformat the drive though.

[bad_brain]

well, the question is if the HDD has been formatted or not. imo it wasn't, because else it would at least recognize the file system.
there are 2 options:
- read out the physical drive by a recovery program...get "get data back for FAT" here: http://www.runtime.org/ ...should be no problem to activate it..*wink* but you will definitly need a 2nd HDD for storing the recovered files on.
- trying to fix the master boot record...because imo it's damaged, else at least the file format would be recognized (if it's not been formatted with a *nix format), look here.

[pseudo_opcode]

First i would like to know how can you say he formatted?? How did you check the file system??

What do you see on your screen when you boot the computer???

If the mbr is corrupted then you dont need any third party tools, insert the winxp cd.. and in bios make first boot device cd... during installation it will ask you to press R to repair, once you do that, there's a command something like "fixmbr" or you can type help to see list of commands coz i m not sure what is it exactly.

If the he really formatted it then you can go to professional guys who recover disks, they'll put the drive on primary slave and have several ways and softwares to recover data.. or there are other ways as well.

[ElsaBorzoi]

I really appreciate everybody's input on this. I thought it might be somehing like that, but sometimes whenyou are too close to the situation, you have brain fade. In the amount of time the kid used the computer, he wouldn't have had time to overwrite it 20 times, and since he is all gamer, Linux would be out of the question. Thank you for the links and everything. I'm not a real pirate myself; I do "evaluate" a lot of things, but that being said, I intend to buy the things I find real useful when I get working again.

Els