Trying to restore files from deleted partition

[TheSnowman]

Hi all,

I'm having some trouble with a Hitachi drive.

I've wiped it and reinstalled windows 10 on it.

I've run Active@ Undelete on it and found my old deleted partitions in excellent condition showing all my files, but when I try to restore them, the only files that work are the ones that are 1 sector or less.

Any file that takes up more than 1 sector doesn't preview/open prior to restore or work after restore.

Are my files gone forever or can I try any other recommended software to try and recover the files?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

 

[pclab]

Hi

Important note: don't work directly on the drive. You should do the scan thru other PC.
Give a try to UFS, Rstudio or Reclaime and see the results they can give you.
But if data is overwritten, it's game over.

 

[TheSnowman]

Thanks, I'll try UFS, Rstudio and then reclaime after that.

I have the disk slaved and have also made a disk image from it via the Active@ undelete which appears to be opening on most recovery apps I've opened.

The OS itself used up 40gb reinstalling, but the overall data before the reinstall was about 400gb+

So does a partial overwrite of 40GB enough to destroy everything on the drive over 1 sector? I can see the file structure of the files from before, but literally anything I try to preview is just nonsense hex,ascii, unicode compared to what it should be.

 

[TheSnowman]

Thanks, I'm trying those just now.

I've slaved the drive and taken an image of the drive and been working via that for most of the scans.

The overwrite was about 40gb onto the 400gb worth of data in the background.
I can see the file names etc, but like I say any data over 1 sector fails to open, the hex, ascii, unicode doesn't look good for anything over 1 sector.

 

[Jared]

That's typically because the software isn't properly finding the partition start, or because it's only finding the indexing in the middle of the partition.

With 40Gb overwritten, most likely all you'll get is a RAW recovery by file type. How do the RAW results look?