Undeleting formatted files for free?

[bweaver]

looking for share- or free-ware to help bring my files back to life. Sis formatted my pc trying to open what i had locked by finally using a password in Admin, immediately forgetting it, and STILL closed it! i have $1.48 in the bank, unless there's a real good sale at the dollar store between now and july 3. i just want my files back, i can SEE them in advanced backup, but they are 'shadow files', lost to the pc's life before formatting. help?

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

 

[bweaver]

thanks! i'll give it a try! sorry for repeating my letter, it asked me to confirm i was real & this was my email address, then it said, "ask your question"...as you can see, i'm mighty good at following directions. :^B (d'oh!)

 

[nhasian]

TestDisk, Data Recovery
TestDisk is powerful free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.

TestDisk Step By Step to recover lost partitions and repair damaged FAT/NTFS boot sector
Recover deleted files from NTFS partition

NOTE If seeked lost file are still missing, give PhotoRec a try. PhotoRec is a signature based file recovery utility and may be able to recover your data where other methods failed.

PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from hard disks, CD-ROMs, and lost pictures (thus the Photo Recovery name) from digital camera memory. PhotoRec ignores the file system and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media's file system has been severely damaged or reformatted.

 

[bweaver]

thanks! i will try this out & report back promptly! your help is very appreciated!

 

[bweaver]

Well, i really did try to understand TestDisk, but unfortunately--even though it may be a great product--it isn't idiot-proof, and after downloading it, didn't 'get' how to make it work . So i would have to say Piriform's Recuva worked best. It brought back a whole bunch of stuff i'd forgotten about! And although a lot of the pictures were 'Unrecoverable' (it said "see this pic? you can't have it back! Mwahaha!") i discovered by pressing 'print screen' & sending it to paint, they WERE recoverable. Three hundred and forty-seven print screens later, they're back (and everything dredged up has been copied so this won't happen again). It saved a lot of videos, but maybe not the audio. Or maybe the format, which took away Internet and Media Center & has caused a whole lot of yellow question marks in Device Manager-- it could be the sound is there but hiding. The good thing is, all the important stuff is back, and as long as i can't remember what's missing, i'm happy. Now all i have to do is make sure all files are backed up on flash drives so i can send my computer back to zeroes. i've had it since 2003, and it's the Only thing i have learned to do well (and it seems the best solution since so many programs got fragmented). THANK YOU SO VERY VERY MUCH for all your help! It's nice to know there are people out there who understand some of us no matter how hard we try, remain clueless. Awesome site!

 

[bweaver]

Best answer selected by bweaver.

 

[terencegem28]

thanks. really helpful.