Recovering data from a hard drive question

So like a complete idiot, i saved what i wanted from my current hard drive and saved it in a folder but then didn't transfer it off the hard drive and started the IBM recovery disk on that same hard drive.

I did however stop the process after a couple % after i realized what i did. Is there anyway to recover those files? Even professionally?

thanks

 

professionally....quite possibly. (expensive)

By yourself...dicey. It all depends on what it looks like now.

There are different programs that do different things. Some will recover lost partitions, some will recover lost files. Technically, your situation is neither. Before I did anything, I'd drop the drive in another machine and see what it looks like if possible.

Most recovery disks technically rewrite a drive bit by bit--essentially a disk image. How that image is applied may dictate what your drive looks like right now. It could be that the mbr was destroyed, but the files are still present. The biggest problem is that you likely lost your folder structure, meaning you would need to recover files individually.

I think the first thing I might try is testdisk to see if it can recreate the disk structure.

 

you can try PC Inspector File Recovery it's free and it worked for me when i was trying to recover some files

 

1) Define expensive? $100, $200, north of $200?
2) The rest of your post was waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay over my head. However i guess the main thing i'd need to recover are .jpg and .avi files (pictures and some videos). The rest is fine to be lost because it was a drive that i didn't do much with because i was having a problem with something, so just main thing i lost are pictures and movies.

Thanks

 

Ok, i'm going to take a look at the hard drive and see what i can find and try the PC inspector file and see what i find

 

You can also try this, which is free.

http://www.recuva.com/

 

Success!

I used the following free demo to see if my files were still there called "Getdataback."

http://www.download.com/GetDataBack-Data-Recovery/3000-2094_4-10061631.html

The software is free to use as a file viewer to find out if your data is still there. Once it is there if you want to copy it off you will need to purchase a registry key.

In my case i was able to find my data and plan on purchasing the key to get my pictures/photo. Maybe there are other freeware versions out there but this was the most simple to use one that i found and installed/ran.

Thanks for any/all help and hopefully someone will find this post one day and they'll be able to get their data back too