School computers all messed up at my work

[julie]

Anybody here work in a com it dept? our local school system totally did it with the dog today when they were trying to link my home computer with my work computer and dumped everything off my home computer, just wondering if anybody knows how to undelete stuff

[Fred588]

I am no expert but the first thing to try would be to open your recycle bin. If files have been deleted and IF they have not been over-written, and IF the recycle bin has not been emptied, there should be ab obvious way to undelete them.

Anybody here work in a com it dept? our local school system totally did it with the dog today when they were trying to link my home computer with my work computer and dumped everything off my home computer, just wondering if anybody knows how to undelete stuff

[MuddyEddie]

Anybody here work in a com it dept? our local school system totally did it with the dog today when they were trying to link my home computer with my work computer and dumped everything off my home computer, just wondering if anybody knows how to undelete stuff

If it's not in the Recycle bin, then the program "recuva" can usually rescue deleted files.

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

Eddie

[tempman]

Yea, unless (since you have no control over where the computer places them) the computer decides to put a file in the same location as a deleted file - then using something like Recuva will work for you. But you would need full access to that computer.

See when you delete a file normally you don't actually lose the file. The OS just removes the "address" of the file on the HDD. To put it simply.

(Or at least this is what I was told a good few years ago... god knows if its still the same )

[dlodoski]

I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure that a purist would remove that drive if it's a 'C' drive - and do the un-delete function from a fresh or different operating system. It all depends on how important the deleted files really are. Windows constantly writes to the C drive and each time it does, files may be written over. Even installing undelete software hastily can add to this problem.

I have used 'ntfsundelete' with good success in the past.

[reisen55]

1. Hard drive out and into a freezer for 20 min.

2. Easy Recovery, which you can find on a search for fosi appz, can recover data off of bad drive. Freezer usually works for one or two passes.

3. Use a usb connect from your failed drive to a system drive or install as a secondary drive.

4. Now you have learned about backups.

[tempman]

That freezer stuff really does work too. I used it for a broken HDD a few years ago. As it got warm again it started to corrupt files and eventually it just broke entirely. Since data was stored perpendicular freezers have been data recovers best friends.

[Kookus]

The freezer trick is only really useful for drives that have suffered a physical failure -- operating the drive outside of the suggested norms, either higher or lower, can sometimes bring about unpredictable results, the best of which can occasionally include a few minutes of proper drive function. Notice all the qualifiers there? It's hardly a reliable method, and we generally used it as a last resort on knocking drives after swapping controller boards and various other tricks. For a drive whose data has simply been manhandled by an overzealous admin, tossing it in the freezer won't do you a bit of good.

Dave is spot on: if the data is at all important to you, and you're serious about recovery, step one is to disconnect the drive as soon as humanly possible. Any extraneous writes to what the drive now considers to be slack space can and very likely will result in permanent (for the purposes of home recovery efforts) data loss. What you want to do is mount the drive as a slave in another system -- best practice is actually to create a bit-for-bit raw copy of the drive using one of a number of imaging techniques before going any further, but I won't assume you're going to spend that much time on this project.

There are a host of recovery programs out there for you to try. I personally recommend Easy Recovery, as mentioned above, since it is far and above the most user-friendly recovery app out there. IIRC, they even have a "trial" version which will show you the recoverable files on your drive, but won't allow you to save them elsewhere. Whatever you go with, the most important thing to remember is to save to the master drive; never, ever, under any circumstances, use a recovery program that restores files "in place", for reasons we covered in the above paragraph: overwrites.

Data recovery is a nerve-wracking business; especially when it's your own data. Be patient, be prepared for disappointment, and get some sleep. It's even money even under the best of conditions.

[Mynock]

Can't help you with recovery, but I can recommend one of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822242015
Plug it in once a month (or however often you feel is necessary) copy everything you don't want to lose onto it, then stick it back someplace safe (I store mine in my fire safe).

[newtothis2]

I've used the system restore tool several times to put things back the way they were prior to "an event". Not sure how much access you have to the computer systems etc.
Go to start>all programs>accessories>system tools and scroll down to system recovery
and it will prompt you to set a day/time to reset your computer back to.
In your case set it back to a time before the event occured. Restart and you should be back to where you began.

Hope this helps