calculatedChaos Gaming

So yeah, someone - most likely my stupid step-father, deleted our entire hard drive or something.
I mean no one even told us what they were doing, they know nothing about computers and now I think I'm going to cry or puke.

I had all my pictures on there since freshman year and now they are all gone!
I want to blow something up.

Is there anyway to get them back or is my entire highschool life gone?
I have a senior scrapbook due in May and now what am I gonna do?!

have you done _anything_ to that hard disk since? (added files, formatted, reinstalled windows, etc.) if you have, this increases the chances that the old data has been overwritten. if you can, just power the computer its attached to off.

ive used 'Recuva' to recover files from a corrupted file system on a flash card, but never a hard disk. not sure if it will work for you or not. any recovery work you do will require you to hook up the hard drive up to another computer as a secondary disk.

good luck.

[[ and yea, i would kinda feel like i would want to throw up too... ]]

this isnt legal but it will probably work. you wont get them all back but you will get some at least. if you need help using it pm me on steam and i'll walk you through it.

sorry the site for it is down i'll get it to you asap. just dont do anything crazy with your harddrive like installing or saving aything til then or you'll lose a lot more stuff

i dont think she will have steam if her hd has been formatted.

sorry to hear youve lost it all. that _really_ sucks.

this same thing happened to me once, and i lost a fair amount of work. i felt probably pretty much how you feel now. now i keep my photos locally on a removable hard disk attached to my server AND i have the "good ones" up on my website (about 24gb), serving as a secondary backup. i just recently built a RAID on the system as well, to add yet another layer of redundancy. just to make sure ive got everything, a couple of times a year i burn out the year-to-date photos to dvd. (do i sound completely paranoid now?)

did you have anything on Flikr or Picasa that you can fall back on at all?

Just a thought, but you might be able to find an online storage/backup service of some type? (like Windows Live Skydrive)

Moral: Save a copy of important stuff on a disc or something.

you can stillg et some of them back even after a format...i just need that stupid site back up it just wont work right now

Some of it, maybe, but not all of it.

The way it works is that when you delete something, you aren't actually getting rid of it. You are hiding it from view and telling the OS that it can use that section of the hard drive to save something else. With a system restore like the way this was done, it probably marked the whole drive for deletion and then started fresh off the disk. That means that any files that were in the 'beginning' of the drive would have been overwritten by the OS itself and any files on the backup disk. More of it got overwritten when she installed any new software, saved anything to her computer or basically did anything that requires HD space.

Part of the issue is that lets say you deleted a 12KB file and a 15KB file. Those things were on two different areas of the hard drive. Problem is that it isn't like a stack of cups, where you take out the middle one and everything else drops down. The next time you save a 30kb file, it could split it in 3, saving one part in the 12kb slot, one part in the 15kb slot and the rest at the end. If any one part of your file got overwritten by the backup, even if you could recover part of the file it would be corrupt.

That's the way i have alwayd understood it anyway.

yeah thats pretty much it but also files arent continuous on the hd they are scattered. like you have that 12kb file
but 4 kb are here 3 are here and 5 are over there. so the cnances of getting much back if you have done much with the computer are slim

captainangry wrote: That's the way i have alwayd understood it anyway.

ah, memories of systems architechture class.... thats pretty much the way it works. the file system just deletes the reference to the file in the file table. it doesnt get overwritten until the space is actually needed. most modern OSes use journaling (logging), so you can basically 'roll back', adding the references back to the table. some files will end up corrupted, since parts of them may have been overwritten, but others may be completely untouched and recoverable.

z0th wrote:

captainangry wrote: That's the way i have alwayd understood it anyway.

ah, memories of systems architechture class.... thats pretty much the way it works. the file system just deletes the reference to the file in the file table. it doesnt get overwritten until the space is actually needed. most modern OSes use journaling (logging), so you can basically 'roll back', adding the references back to the table. some files will end up corrupted, since parts of them may have been overwritten, but others may be completely untouched and recoverable.

I made a point to throw that in there, just in case i was completely wrong Gotta cover my own ass.

im just a huge geek. i have no defense.

Exact revenge on all suspects with painful torture methods