Colossal System Failure

[Polaris]

I just had a massive system crash an hour ago and had to reinstall Windows XP - not all my files, some of which are irreplaceable, are gone. Is there any way to mine those from the hard drive? I'd heard that what was saved there never really goes away.

[stormer]

From another thread
Real Men Don't Do Backups.

Real Men Cry.
My condolences

[MortFurd]

I just had a massive system crash an hour ago and had to reinstall Windows XP - not all my files, some of which are irreplaceable, are gone. Is there any way to mine those from the hard drive? I'd heard that what was saved there never really goes away.
Ya shouldn't oughta reinstalled on the same drive.

That quite likely overwrote anything that was there. Up to that point, you had a really decent chance at recovering the missing files. You could have reinstalled to a new drive, then plugged the old one in as a secondary and looked for your missing files on the old drive.

Now, your only hope is to make an image of your drive and use a program like testdisk to root through the image and try to dig your files out of the rubble.

I don't know what program you could use under Windows XP. If it were me, I'd burn a Damn Small Linux bootable CD and use it to make the image on a new drive. Then I'd use testdisk under DSL to do the search and rescue, writing the recovered files back to the original drive.


If you don't make backups, you better be good at recovery. If you do make backups, you'd still better be good at recovery because sometimes backup (or restore) programs (and hardware) fail.

[asthmatic camel]

You could try this (http://www.officerecovery.com/freeundelete/), although if you've reinstalled XP and formatted your drive, there's not much hope. Still, it might be useful in the future.

[ShowMe]

I just had a massive system crash an hour ago and had to reinstall Windows XP - not all my files, some of which are irreplaceable, are gone. Is there any way to mine those from the hard drive? I'd heard that what was saved there never really goes away.

As others have stated by writing over your drive you have probably lost what you want.

Windows "deletes" a file by removing it from the directory by setting a bit, which also marks that space as useable. Over time you get a lot of little spaces where temp files have been written & deleted and were otehr programs have put themselves. So the programs are kind of scattered; defragging your disk puts all of those fragments in a a nice pretty order.

That's kind of an aside though. Once that space is marked as available it will eventually be overwritten. So it does go away at some point, but not necessarily right after you delete it.

It comes down to a matter of luck, time, luck, drive activity and luck. If your hard drive has crashed luck obviously isn't on your side.

It is barely possible you may get it back. There are a number of free utilities out there that can do this. Are they a particular type of file? Pictures, word documents, etc?