New member GREETINGS + Question....

Recuva
1

Thanks for offering this handy data recovery program.

I have a nice desktop PC running two harddrives. One for running Windows, and the other secondary drive for storing all my music, movies, pictures....and basically everything that is worth anything to me, like part of mysoul.

Anyway, two nights ago I decided that my system was running far too slowly & buggy for me to put up with any longer, and thus time to fix the problem by doing what I've done on occassions when my PC starts running...well, basically like s**t! That is to reformat the primary drive & then load a clean installation of Windows 7 from scratch. I assume most of you know that installing a fresh clean install of Windows is most definitely the best method to get your system running as good as new again, and I personally don't mind doing it occassionally for that reason.

OH.. BUT FIRST MAKE DAMN SURE YOU ARE REFORMATTING THE RIGHT HARDDRIVE! I thought I was sure, but oh I did f*** up! YES indeed I formatted the wrong drive, and I lost one of the largest most valuable music collections of classic rock, blues & other types of music worth collecting. As matter of fact (& a point of personal pride too) I never met anyone who had a more impressive and complete classic rock collection with the artist's completely discography in flac. (lossless sound quality) or 320kbps .mp3 formats. It was a beautiful sight to behold, especially how I had arranged all the folders with the abum cover art showing & all. Most people who saw my collection would tell me I should do an online radio broadcast and that was a plan of mine. But I also had plenty of meaningful pictures and personally sentimental documents, saved emails, etc. Movies too, although I couldnt care less about the movies. But this loss was EPIC! A catastrophy..... and I keep being reminded of something else I lost that I will likely never be able to replace! So much rare & personally important files I lost..........I hope you all can feel a bit of my heartache!

I was glad to find out about Recuva..... and earlier today I let the program run for over 5 hours. And when I came back today it had retreived quite a bit of files, yet I had not yet been able to sit down and go over them. But then I changed something with my internet connection and it asked me to LOG OFF and LOG back ON windows again..... which I did. And when logged back on, I could not see any sign of Recuva or the data it spent 5+ hours retreiving.

Pleasse help me know what to do next? Also I am running Recuva on the same harddrive I am running my new instalation of Win 7. Should I run the program from the other harddrive that I meant to format instead? I could easily install windows on the other drive and then run the Recuva from that drive, leaving this active disc more free to let Recuva recover my data..... hoping it will succeed in that to some degree.

Please respond soon. Thank you ANYONE for any wisdom or advice. Any feedback or helpful responses to me will be rewarded with love & GOOD KARMA, and perhaps much more. : )

Take care, God bless.

Thanks, =)

Sherwin Maxawow

PS. Forgive me for writing such a loooong winded post!

2

URGENT - STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING.

I understand you to have an OLD SLOW Windows on what was your primary drive.

and a brand NEW FAST Windows on what had been your secondary drive.

Every minute that you are using your new fast windows you are destroying a bit more of your valued collections.

Perhaps at this moment Windows is busy updating with hundreds of security updates, and destroying a few more Gigabytes of what remains.

Immediately stop using your new Windows and switch back to using the old windows.

Every time you write a new file to what had been your secondary drive, you will probably over-write one of your lost collections.

Recuva can restore a deleted file that has not been over-written.

Recuva may restore files after a partition has been formatted

Recuva cannot do much for a file that has been over-written.

You have probably lost 15 GB of used space with new Windows 7, plus whatever pagefile.sysy and hiberfile.sys take.

and then some more with Windows Updates.

I do will leave it to others with more experience than myself to advise on how to use Recuva

3

THANK YOU very much you for explaining that to me. But what if I have already have run the full Recuva disc scan from the new Windows installation and is now showing a whole ton of recovered files and many are in an "excellent" state. Would it be best to copy what recovered data & files I can now?

Plus, I must add that my older copy of windows is really corrupt, so perhaps I should re-install it on another disc and run Recover from that one?

Thank you once again for your help and any further advice.

4

I am confident that you should stop all writing to the partition or drive that you wish to recuva files from.

You should be safe to install Windows on the drive you originally intended.

I suggest that until given further advise you make no further attempts at doing anything with the drive you need to Recuva.

You must not Recuva files to the same drive/partition that you are restoring from.

Now might be a good time to get an external drive for holding whatever Recuva is able to retrieve.

5

I assume most of you know that installing a fresh clean install of Windows is most definitely the best method to get your system running as good as new again, and I personally don't mind doing it occassionally for that reason.

The format way of dealing with a bugged up Windows is thankfully for me like a completely extinct dinosaur, as is ever calling Dell Tech Support again which is too "format happy" to fix the simplest of problems! Of course I still have the fossilized instructions in a binder about the format procedure, but will never need them ever again.

I use a known good backup image created with freeware disk imaging software to restore a fully up-and-running/working Windows in about 40 minutes instead of spending countless days reinstalling everything, and then messing about for up to a month to get each and every settings/tweaks and reinstalling any software I've forgotten about back to the way I had them before.

6

First, some rules of using Recuva. Following these two rules will maximize what data you can recover.

1 - immediately stop writing to the disk from which you want to recover files.

2 - save recovered files to a separate disk (buy one if necessary)

Second, for the future, have two copies of everything that is valuable. A $100 drive that basically sits, seemingly unused, in the corner of the closet, collecting dust, is now a godsend! It will save you time when you make a mistake, it will save your important data, it will save you bux deluxe - no need for expensive data recovery services.. When catastrophe strikes, as it does to the best of us, you're covered. This is something no user should ever be without. EVER!

Thirdly, the idea of building up a working system "just so" and "perfect" is great. You then back up an image of all your working applications and system. Whenever you need a copy of this, to "rebuild" your system, BAM! It takes all but 1/2 hour to do what a week long reformat-reinstall-rebuild ordeal would accomplish. Just restore from your previously made disk image. Incredible!

7

Thanks for making things so clear for me. I feel a bit dumb now, but I guess you live & learn. Perhaps I needed to have this kind of experience first hand to really learn some valuable lessons. Now having gone through it personally, I doubt that I'll ever make the same kinds of mistakes again in the future.

Plus, I am learning from this to not be so dependent on "stuff" to be happy in life. We must remember to be grateful for whatever we have, and not be so focused & worried about what we don't have! We are often so spoiled in this modern technological age. Just imagine if we could travel back in time, clear back to the 1800's... and found some 20-something year old cowboy a free ride to come back to live in our time, just to BLOW HIS MIND, and see his reaction to our world! Imagine if we could appreciate our technology that much? We all take so much for granted. We gotta step back and APPRECIATE all the cool stuff we have, because it really is an amazing world we live in.