New recovery way

Hi !

First Thanks for giving recuva for free !

I am looking for a way to recovery file that i did not find anywhere :(

Recuva can find deleted files/folders, but also lost files / folders (that are orphan).

When files have been deleted a long time ago, but are still in excellent state, there is no way to recover them directly on the same hard drive. Yes, i know what "restoring on the same had drive" exactly means in term of consequences ! I am computer science engineer so i am aware about overwriting, file system format etc. But i think there could be a way to do that (maybe i am wrong). I am going to explain a case where this method could be used.

Hypothesis :

When you scan a hard drive, you should know where (in term of "offset", or cluster, cylinder etc...) are the files/folders on the hard drive. By knowing i mean, the location are saved in your program's variables. So if only these data was overwitten on the hard drive that should not be a problem for Recuva (as long as we dont close Recuva of course ! ).

So these informations on the hard drive are not really important anymore. And we could overwrite them with new fresh data.

Case:

If i have a disk with a capacity of 100go, that was totally full of files. I delete all, reinstall an OS on it. Then delete all the OS file, and want to recover the previous 100Go ! Recuva says me that 90Go are in excellent state, very logical because the 10% part has been overwritten when i installed the OS :). So i want recover these 90Go.. but i dont have another hard drive :( and dont want to buy a new one just for that.

New way:

My idea is the following : Rather than copy all file to another hard drive, which take some time, why just undelete file / folder directly on the same hard drive, using the space of 10% of the file i dont want to recover (the unselected ones, or even the empty space on the disk) to correct the folder entry and magically make the file appear back?

That would avoid a copy of 90Go (very long !), would avoid buying another hard drive.

Could this idea be implemented ?

Am i dreaming out loud about a SF way or is this idea makeable ?

Is there any specific device things that make this impossible to do ?

I hope i am clear.

Dont hesitate to ask some question if i am not.

Thanks for reading me

I don't think the Windows API for creating files can take a physical location on the drive as a parameter... ( source: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa363858%28VS.85%29.aspx ) :unsure: