Re instal Windows XP

[benzino007]

Dear friend,

Good day. Please I need your help. I mistakenly re installed the Windows Xp on my Laptop and most of the files were over written.

Please how can I recover some of the files(Pictures/Music files) that were once stored in my documents folder?

I will appreciate if we can chat on gmail or yahoo now. My ID is: contactkuben@gmail.com or contactkuben@yahoo.co.uk. OR just send the details to my either emails now

Thanks for your kind gesture

[FAT64]

Take your HD to a Data Recovery company. They'll charge an arm and a leg, though. Otherwise, I think you can kiss your files goodbye.

[jaclaz]

Of course overwritten data CANNOT be recovered, and the CANNOT applies also to data recovery companies.

What you can try is using PHOTOREC, the accompanying app to TESTDISK:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

DON'T EVEN THINK of using it from your booted XP on the laptop, every hour, minute, second, that the XP on it is running, something else may be overwritten.

You can try using it from a bootCD, like the good UBCD:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

use latest beta:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1786

that includes partedmagic, which includes photorec.

Booting it from a USB stick is also possible.

You will also need ANOTHER drive to store whatever PHOTOREC will be able to retrieve.

Ideally you should remove the HD from your laptop and connect it through a USB interface or as slave with an IDE 2.5" to 3.5" to a working PC, and use the "other" PC's HD to store the recovered files.

Even better, you should create a complete clone of the laptop HD on an external drive, (UBCD has several tools for this) and then attempt the recovery from the image on another PC.

Please understand that Photorec tries to recover files bypassing the (overwritten) filesystem thus you WILL NOT be able to recover filenames.

jaclaz

[Macccer]

I would go for the last option.