Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.perform_maintain (
More info?)
"Robert" <anonymous@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:37e901c4a911$d47c4a70$a601280a@phx.gbl...
> Well, 15 days ago I attempted to install Service Pack 2.
> After losing Windows and being "guided" by numerous
> employees of Microsoft attempting to remove SP2 I ended
> up perfoming a product recovery.
>
> Question: How do I recover thousands of hours of data,
> approximately 10,000+ items?
>
> Robert
There is software available that will recover data, even after a drive has
been formatted and re-written. Some of it is quite expensive, but it depends
on how important that data is. Some of it also requires a certain level of
expertise, so cost isn't the only factor.There are also some freeware
programs that work reasonably well. You can do a search on Google for Data
Recovery Software, Unerase, Undelete, and Unformat, and you'll find plenty
of options.
If the data is really important, you might be better off going to a
professional data recovery company. That, too, is going to be expensive, but
you have a better chance of getting the data back, since they have the
expertise.
Anything you do with that hard drive is lessening the chance that the data
will be recoverable, and that includes installing the data recovery
software.
In the future, you might want to consider some sort of backup strategy as
data on hard drives is pretty volatile. It's not IF you're going to lose it,
it's WHEN. It could just as easily have been a virus or a hard drive crash
that wiped out your data.
Also, when you're taking advice from people, you can stop at any time you
like, ask for other opinions, ask more questions, etc. You could have asked
at this newsgroup, for example, or taken the computer somewhere for repair.
Chances are it was repairable without resorting to drastic measures, and the
data should have been backed up before getting too much further into the
"repair."
All of the recovery CDs I've seen make it pretty clear that the drive is
going to be wiped clean and all data lost. If you didn't want to take that
step, you could have stopped then, and the data would have been more easily
recoverable. At this point, it's probably still recoverable, it's just a
matter of what you're willing to pay.
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