Recovering files from "clusters"

[Bernard Jazz]

I recently had my PC repaired but for the guy repairing it somehow deleted the partition on my second HD thus losing all my files.

Anyways, i found a program that can recover deleted files but they've all been recovered as clusters and they aren't really much use. Is there any way i can get them working?

[K^2]

If you got all of them, It should be possible. How much data do you have? If it's under 8GB, I can make a simple modification to the program I've been using to do the same thing with the floppy. Also, is it FAT32 or NTFS?

 

One more thing you can do is to put the partition back. If you know exactly where the partition starts, that is what cylinder, head, and sector, you can simply create a partition in the same space using any partitioning program, and if you don't format, you should have all your data as it was.

[Bernard Jazz]

whoops.. i kinda formatted it..

It's NTFS anyway and i recovered the clusters after i formatted.

[K^2]

Most likely, after formating, you just recovered formated clusters, which contain no data. Try opening them with a hex editor.

 

There are some ways to recover data after formating, but I doubt that the program you used does that.

[Bernard Jazz]

Some of the clusters came out as jpeg files which open perfectly well with MS Paint, photoshop, etc. So i'm pretty sure they contain data.

[K^2]

Hmm... Interesting. You didn't opt for a "Quick Format" by any chance, have you? Because that's just a confusing way of saying, "Mark all clusters as empety, but don't actually do anything to the data." If that's the case, then yes, you should be able to recover the files, as long as you can restore the file system itself. I know some tools that can recover the data if you can manage to put these clusters back onto a disk, but I'm not sure about any program that would work with the files containing cluster data.

 

Edit: I never worked with NTFS directly, so I really am not sure how difficult it would be to reconstruct the tree. I know that in FAT32 it is quite difficult to restore files more than 1 cluster long, and that includes the directory listings. NTFS might have something to make it a bit easier, though. I read descriptions, but you can't really be sure unles you see how it works for yourself. I'll try to see if I can grab some piece of my system HDD to see how NTFS works. If I'll find anything useful, I'll let you know.

Edited April 15, 2006 by K^2

[Bernard Jazz]

I did go for a quick format, and all the clusters have been put on disk.

Thanks

[Ryan_]

getdataback for ntfs............

google it

[K^2]

It's good, but it will only work if he still has the data on the HDD itself. It does not work with extracted clusters, as far as I remember. Also, the demo version only recovers one file at a time. If he has a lot of data, that can take a while.