Hello everyone,
In attempting to repair a friend's computer, I seriously messed up our family's computer and found myself dishing out $80.00 for recovery software.
Well, the question is... Should I dump my friend or their computer?
Humor aside, I am facing quite a dilemma. I was attempting to low-level format an ATA password-protected hard-drive when it happened.... Yes, I made the most terrible mistake of all time, I failed to verify before pressing Enter. Well, 10 seconds later (or 15, whichever is longer
) I realized my mistake and immediately aborted the procedure. Naturally, the damage was already done. The Partition was already affected rendering the disk as unpartitioned space. Not to worry... I was familiar with partition recovery software which I promptly purchased after realizing it would only show off it's muscle but wouldn't let me use it. Two days later (due to a few mistakes on my part), I finally found myself in a position to recover the partition. After a few clicks of the mouse, recovery was successful... to an extent.
After recovery, Windows could not access the partition. I figured this may be due to methods used by the recovery software to patch up the partition. So I proceeded to use the second half of my spanking-new recovery software to retrieve the files within my partition. The tool worked a miracle, except (of course, another twist
) for some critical files. A few Microsoft Word documents were not readable after recovery. I came to three conclusions...
1. The documents were destroyed by the low-level format.
2. The documents were not recovered properly.
3. The MFT (Master File Table) was affected by the low-level format resulting in a faulty recovery of these Word documents (The File Recovery procedure I used located these Word Documents via the recovered partition's MFT).
Conclusions 1 and 2 seem prominent. To test them I'm currently running an in-depth scan of the disk in hopes it might produce better results. I must admit... I'm doubtful.
Does anyone have recommendations for software or methods which may result in a more successful recovery of these files? I'm attempting to save myself lots of work in recreating these files, I would much rather recover them. NOTE: The only change to this hard-drive since the low-level format was the partition-recovery.
Lessons learned:
Backup your information onto non-rewritable discs!I backed these files onto rewritable disks and a few days down the road overwrote the information thinking I wouldn't need it.
Confirm before pressing Enter!Would you rather spend days recovering your work or simply spend a few seconds to verify disk size, name, and type?
Burn the code to your gun-safe!Self-explanatory.
