Trying to restore files from drive that wsa "reset to factory settings"

[jkk]

So my friend let another friend try to fix her PC by restoring it to factory settings (HP) using the recovery partition.

 

I've removed the drive, placed it in my enclosure and am not trying to use Recuva to recover what I can find. Looking for non-deleted files shows only those files from the OS re-install. I don't think I saw any files from the previous installation.

 

Do I need to run the deep scan to see these files? Or are the files gone?

[mta]

a deep scan will tell you if they are recoverable or not.

 

it also depends on what the HP restore did. last time I saw one in action it formatted the drive or wipe the partition, from memory.

[jkk]

a deep scan will tell you if they are recoverable or not.

 

it also depends on what the HP restore did. last time I saw one in action it formatted the drive or wipe the partition, from memory.

Running the deep scan now. I ran it for a few minutes, stopped it and saw that it found some music files amongst 100000 others.

 

So, it is possible to retrieve files from a formatted or wiped drive, right?

[mta]

So, it is possible to retrieve files from a formatted or wiped drive, right?

 

Possible, in theory. Reality can be a different story.

 

Sadly it's going to be a suck-it-and-see exercise.

 

The obstacles against you are going to be what has happened to your data since the Windows was reloaded.

HP wouldn't of just reloaded Windows, it would have done something to the drive first - a reformat, delete the partition, who knows.

Then Windows would have been reloaded from an image on the recovery partition, then the standard operating environment including all the crapware that HP offers.

Then, maybe, someone would have loaded their personal software, settings etc.

 

Each time the hard drive was written to, your personal data was made that little bit harder to recover.

 

I'm guessing the person who did the reload ignored the big 'Are you sure?' warning that hopefully HP would have displayed. (excusable - we all make mistakes)

I'm also going to guess from this Recuva exercise, that there are no backups. (inexcusable - that's just laziness)

 

And as a last kick in the guts, even when you find the files, and Recuva does it's magic, the files could still be corrupted, or at least in a state to be unusable.

 

Sadly it all comes down to how much activity has gone on.

 

But, fingers are crossed....

[Guest Keatah]

It found 100,000 file headers. Whether those headers belong to complete files or overwritten files is another thing.

[johnthechef]

I've had to reset my drive to factory settings because I had a terminal problem. I had a back-up and so managed to recover almost everything except for a batch of very recent photographs. Unfortunately I'd used the camera since these were taken and can't get the deleted pics from the camera card (even using a deep scan). I've run a deep scan on my C drive but there's over 100,000 photos which are sort of randomly grouped. Does anyone know whether it is possible to search the recovered items for specific photographs by using their "names" (ie pic 111000JPG) or by date?