hard drive recovery

[Androme]

I deleted my partition by mistake and 3% into formatting the drive I realised what the mistake was. Apparently alot of it is recoverable the files. I've tried boot cd's with tools on (hiren's boot cd for example) none of them helped.

So it leaves me with no choice but to go to a specialist. Know of a good price quote to recover the above? Win XP, 250GB disk (need everything recovered) ATA133 etc.

And who to go to as well?

Thanks

[Allfather]

I used a program called ntfsrecovery (google it). cost alittle, but worked well.
I got back rougly 480gb of around 490gb of crap i had on it.

And this was after 1 "crash" and 2 formats.

[pablissimo]

Buy a cheap second drive and buy something for recovery purposes, if in doubt there're probably reviews in PC Pro or similar magazines that you can rely on fairly well. Assuming it boots off a CD and you're restoring to another partition it should be a non-destructive operation, so if it doesn't work you can still go to the data recovery specialist route but I'd be prepared to spend a fair amount of money on it, and often with success metrics that mean you can still be missing data and owe them money.

[Androme]

allfather - doesn't do the job (it only found 3 files...) :O thanks tho

pab - cheers. is there a guarantee that they won't snoop at recoverable files and make backups etc.?

[pablissimo]

Other than the illegality of it, probably not. They're going to have to look at some of the data to see if it's been recovered or if it's gibberish, and since it's getting recreated things like access timestamps wouldn't help you in figuring out if they had or not.

However, a lot of data recovery firms do most of their work for SMEs, and so finding a reputable one probably isn't that hard. If you're a business, you're not going to throw a couple of server disks full of customer data off to some placement student (in theory).

Sorry I can't help on costs, though phoning a couple firms up and asking will normally yield a consultation fee if nothing more substantial. In fact, the consultation thing might be a good idea, since at the cost of a short-term investigation into how viable getting your files back is, you gain the peace of mind that a) they still exist and b) it's worth paying more money to recover them.

[viC]

I helped a friend recover his 300gb external after a 100% quick format, googled about a bit and found Recover My Files. Its actually decent, but you need a second hdd to recover to [so you don't overwrite your old files while recovering].

Also you'll need to deal with renaming files yourself and filtering through them for gibberish [easily doable but be ready to spend time on it - the initial recovery itself will probably take a few hours]. From my experience big movies/music/picture files are easily recoverable.

Recovery specialists are rather expensive so it depends on whats really on the disc and how much time you can afford to spend on it yourself.

[Androme]

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to pablissimo again.

^^ thanks pab for the insight. typical consultation fees look at around £100ish on average of the 5 firms I have tried so far for anyone else who ever considers it.

cheers viC as well. I shall look into the program after this post the only issue is with the fact that i had looadsss of files so renaming them would be tough... oh well :| as long as they can be recovered in their folders because I gave up renaming files along time ago just organised them in folders etc.

[djbass]

By far the best program I've used so far for data recovery is GetDataBack

Its not free but it usually does a pretty damn good job, you could try the trial version which will show you any files it can recover it just wont let you save them.

As for professional services, I've had customers get quotes on data recovery before and it seems to sit in the $2000-3000 (AUD) range.