Recover files from formated & overwritten partition

Using PhotoRec to recover lost data
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TheSwede86
Posts: 1
Joined: 15 Nov 2014, 02:52

Recover files from formated & overwritten partition

#1 Post by TheSwede86 »

Target disk: OCZ Vertex 4 128GB SSD (via an SATA -> USB 3.0 dock), NTFS filesystem
H/W running PhotoRec: Win 7 x64, i7-3770k, 8GB RAM (USB-dock connected to motherboards USB 3.0)

Hi!

Had a friend who forgot to save his girlfriends work from school and formated the partition (didn't remove it but reformated it) and (re-)installed Windows 7 onto it before he remembered the files. The files were on his users desktop in a folder and contained various .DOCX and .PDF documents.

Now I tried to use PhotoRec and filtered the types of files to Microsoft Office formats (i.e. .docx, .ppt etc.) and .PDF and it recovered 353 "doc" and 10 "pdf" using "whole disk scan". None of her files are there though and the one PDF that might be connected to her schoolwork is a big PDF (around 200MB) and Adobe Acrobat Reader says its corrupted. Actually many of the .docx-files are corrupted too.

Is there any other way with PhotoRec or TestDisk to recover the files? Tried the "undelete" feature of TestDisk and at a glance his (or well, her) files weren't listed. Guessing his installation of Windows 7 after formating the partition have overwritten her documents?

Thanks for your help and advice in advance, TheSwede86

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cgrenier
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Re: Recover files from formated & overwritten partition

#2 Post by cgrenier »

Run PhotoRec, enable the Exper mode in Options, start a recovery and choose a blocksize of 512 bytes, use the default parameters otherwise. Do you recover more files this way ?

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