Undelete from before Complete Recovery

[tommy2k10]

My friend had a problem which was getting to the point where I had to reinstall Windows. I had backed up his files before, and then I did a factory reset, which obviously wiped the data. Everything is back in working order now, but for some reason his documents didn't backup. As I have done Samsung Complete Recovery (restore to factory settings) is there a way that I can use TestDisk to get his Documents back, and if so, how do I accomplish this?

[cgrenier]

Run TestDisk, Advanced, Undelete, see http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Undelete ... h_TestDisk for a step by step. If it doesn't work, use PhotoRec http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step

[tommy2k10]

I will try that - when I did the Complete Recovery, is that the equivalent of a format?
Won't TestDisk find files that on the disk currently?

[Fiona]

I will try that - when I did the Complete Recovery, is that the equivalent of a format?

It's usually not equivalent of a format.
You should recover your data to another healthy disk/partition.
Don't write anything to your affected disk or partition anymore.
It increases your damage.
After recovery and if you're satisfy with your result, you can reformat your disk and copy data from your recovery/backup back.

If you were setting back you computer to factory default, you probably were overridden al your data?
In case your data were on another disk/partition please let me know.
If not, you only can check what datarecovery software finds.
You can use PhotoRec and you should run Free and it doesn't scanthe whole space.
It's better because PhotoRec doesn't recover already available data.


Fiona

[tommy2k10]

I have got the files back that I wanted, but they are encoded, and I didn't enocde them. Is there any way I can decode them; they are in western iso format?