Finding deleted files after crash and recovery!?!?

[durandetto]

About a year ago my computer crashed (a five year old HP desktop with Window XP) and I lost about a years worth of pictures including two of my kids birthday parties and his first year of t-ball. Needless to say my wife is pissed and keeps bugging me to find a way to get them back. Is it possible to recover deleted files after a recovery? TIA for any help.

Ted

 

[BigTimeNexusFan]

About a year ago my computer crashed (a five year old HP desktop with Window XP) and I lost about a years worth of pictures including two of my kids birthday parties and his first year of t-ball. Needless to say my wife is pissed and keeps bugging me to find a way to get them back. Is it possible to recover deleted files after a recovery? TIA for any help.

Ted

If you overwrote what was there by re-installing over top of the files then some if not all are GONE. The best thing to do is take the crashed hard drive out of the machine, place it in an external hard drive and do a recovery attempt with software that does that sort of thing.

OR leave the hard drive in the machine and boot from a LIVE CD that has the OS running from the cd (like Knoppix). Then try and copy your files off that way.

The thing you DON'T want to do is re-install the operating system again on the same hard drive. You might just very well overwrite files that you could have gotten back.

 

[smacky]

Wait, you have the original hard drive, it crashed, you reinstalled Windows on that same hard drive and are using it now and are trying to recover old images? It isn't possible.

If you are talking about recovering stuff from a hard drive that hasn't been altered since the crash, you may be able to. PM me and let me know and I'll give you the details on how to go about doing this.