Re : Noob Hard Drive Question

I was wondering , If I have a hard drive with Window XP installed(just an example) then I format it and install Window 7 and now , the drive with window 7.

Now here is the question , is that possible for me to dig up / restore the hard drive Window XP files/OS?

 

You can probably dig up some files (with or w/o corruption), but probably not a proper OS .

 

Something is bound to be overwritten, so you won't get everything back.

 

is that really possible? eg; photos.

As long its bound to overwritten , even a true hard drive expect couldn't get any files?


PS : I just wanted to know if it's possible to dig up files even if overwritten ,not the way of digging files. Thanks in advance.

 

Maybe, but that's a big maybe, usually once something has been overwritten, you can't recover it. If you're willing to pay a couple thousands, maybe, but there is no guarantee that they will be able to recover and reconstruct the data. Any data that is still on parts of the drive that are marked as empty (nothing has been written over what was previously there yet) is recoverable. When you formatted the drive, the space was marked as empty, but the data was still there. Once you started installing windows and other things, you wrote new data over some of the old one so consider that part as lost.

If you format the drive, the first that will be overwritten is the data on the outer edge of the hard drive platter so the first things installed on the drive really like Windows for example.

You could try a utility like Recuva and see what it finds.

 

As long as it is not overwritten, you can dig them up pretty effortlessly. Even if part of the file is overwritten(depending on how), you can recover other part of it.

 

There is a multitude of data recovery software out there. The condition/integrity of the file(s) after using another OS is probably not good, but sometimes you can manage to get some or all of a file back even so. It won't hurt to scan for whatever you're trying to recover and see what turns up. I've used Glary Utilities; it has a "file undelete" tool, although there are more robust programs than that.

 

If you format the drive, it means that 0's were written to the entire drive. In this case, nothing is recoverable, ever. You can be 100% confident that nobody, not even the FBI, is going to be able to recover data from your drive.

However, if you "quick format" the drive, in which case the drive reports there being no data on it, even though nothing was deleted, data that is not overwritten is recoverable.

 

I haven't found out if the former statement is true, but for your worthwhile OP: a full format also checks for bad sectors in addition to formatting.

 

Here's a noob question:

Instaling a data drive in my laptop. Do I need to go into the BIOS to get the system to register the drive, or are non-OS drives pretty much plug n play?

 

It is plug n play, unless we are back in the IDE era with all the master and slave goodies.

 

Install: plug'n'play
Use: but don't forget to partition and format the partition, before that drive is not visible in windows...

 

Gotcha, thanks - yep, figured I'd have to partition/format with disk management, but just wanted to make sure there wasn't any other steps in there...

Thanks!