I installed XP over 98 on a friends computer (wiped drive), I backed up the data, but didnt backup the WINDOWS folder. It turns out that all his Netscape 7 emails were saved in 'WINDOWS/Application Data' which is VERY BAD. I REALLY need help in getting this data back ASAP. Any help is greatly appreciated
earlier today i saw a list of useful apps on here somewhere. there was data recover thing there that might help. I remeber that ncis ep were the got the data of a hax0rs hdd after he used uber-military grade drive wipe stuff hope u can get the emails back
NCIS is probably not the best place to get ideas that would work in the real world from. Then can also identify somebody from a cctv camera with shitty quality whose reflection is on the back of a spoon aswell.
As far as I recall, most people seem to have decent success rates with Get Data Back (it's in the sticky, a few posts down). For now, disconnect the HDD from the computer and don't even think about using it as the primary drive. When recovering data, make it the secondary/slave drive in another system (otherwise Windows will write to the HDD while starting, which will probably overwrite some old data). If the data has been overwritten then it's going to be really, really hard to get back. It won't be something that you can do with a bit of software, because the drive's electronics aren't sensitive enough to read that sort of thing. It'd have to go to a professional data recovery service, and they charge thousands of dollars.
A program called iRecover will help you. 1) Do not tough the drive/partition 2) Aquire iRecover (http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/irecover.htm) 3) Plug the drive into another PC 4) Run iRecover over the drive iRecover will take upto 10 hours to rebuild files sector by sector, it has worked for me many times before when all hope was lost. iRecover does not need an old file allocation table as it builds files from deleted sectors and linked chains in the drive.
if you have wiped the drive and then installed windows xp i dont think you will be able to recover anything. windows has probably overwritten the areas that you need to recover from. good luck thou
