Just restored my X31, but need lost pictures..

[Saysana13B]

I am an hobby photographer. I have a bunch of RAW files, jpegs, all on my computer. I once in a while save it to my portable hard drive for back up.

I was restoring my X31 today. Of course, I save the needed items that I want to see again.

Welll I didn't save my Pictures to my portable HD. I somehow overlooked the most important things to me. The latest restore file I have is July 1st, 2008.

I am wondering if there is anyway, any sort of program that can dig deep and find those pictures? Or are they completely gone. I have heard of programs that go on Memory Sticks and find deleted pictures, I was wondering if theres something similar for my X31.

Lesson Learned!!

[sjthinkpader]

You need professional help. Ontrack near you is one of the best.
http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/minn ... esota.aspx

[rkawakami]

There are some disk utilities that can retrieve "erased" files but they are fairly limited in scope. It's usually a simple matter to be able to immediately recover files that have accidentally been erased but you need to do it before the disk sectors are overwritten with other data. You mention that you lost your files during a "restore". If by that you mean that you ran a full operating system restore procedure and the hard drive was re-formatted, then there may not be any hope.

[Saysana13B]

No, it wasn't a reformat. I used Access IBM and just did a restore from a point when I just received my Laptop. If worse come to worse, I can accept my mistake. I've lost about five months worth of precious photo memories.

[the-wanderer]

Find somebody that knows what they are doing and can run backtrack 4 and run foremost against the drive. If you haven't messed with the drive too much, it can probably pull your pictures back.

[jamiphar]

I've used a free program called PhotoRec which seems to do a very good job with problems like this. You can download it here: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download. If you have another computer you can use, I would suggest connecting the X31 hard drive externally to the second computer and using the PhotoRec to scan for deleted files. The recovered files will not have their original names, but it should be pretty easy to sort through the thumbnails.

If you need help with this, feel free to send me a PM. I've had a lot of success with these problems, hopefully you will, too.

[fasteez]

+1 for photoRec, this program saved me many times, get a live linux cd and inspect your drive with it.

if you can, duplicate your laptop harddrive partitions on another harddrive
otherwise do not ever write files or change things, every new data might overwrite your 'lost' pictures (that means using windows the least possible)

the best would be to have a geeky friend, use a live cd to scan the disk in read only mode.