HELP! I lost all my everything on my computer, how do I get it back?

Question

I accidently cleaned my computer off 100%, now it's a raw computer. I lost all my pictures and music files and well, EVERYTHING! Is there any way to get it all back?

Answer 1

Take it to a computer shop. Normally when things are "deleted" they are just overwritten. They may be able to salvage some of your lost data.

If you formatted your drive you might have a slim to none chance of retrieving your old data.

Answer 2

First off, stop using your computer as soon as possible. This may come across as me being mean or teasing you or something. Actually, the more you use your computer, the more the data is overwritten.

When you format a drive (or repartition it or use a recovery disk), it usually just deletes the filenames. Chances are the recovery disk recovered the original setup to the original (physical) location on the drive. This means that where your files were is now marked as free space (though the files are still there).

What you want to do (assuming these files are really important to you) is buy a new hard drive and replace the existing drive with the new one. Don't leave the old one in.

You'll need to use the recovery disk or windows install disk to get the new drive up to speed.

To get your old data back will require a forensic data recovery specialist. This (usually) costs about $700 - $1500. You'll need to explain that the drive functions, but you need to undo a reformat.

I would expect that you won't consider it worth it in this case.

In my case (two fried hard drives, 19 gb of music, 10 gb original graphics arts, custom software, save games, misc) the drives don't function. A forensic data recovery company will open the drive in a clean-room and move the platters (the data is physically stored on those) into a new hard drive and mirror the data onto a different drive. That costs about $1500 per drive.

In your case the expert will probably need to recover the file allocation table from before the reformat (using a magnetometer) and copy each individual file, sector by sector.

Sounds expensive. Backups come in handy here.

Good luck.

Answer 3

Yes their is, but you will have to pay thousands of dollars to send your hard drive to a recover lab to recover all the information that you lost. I guess you should have backed up all your information to cd/dvd, thats what I do. If you have no operating system, your going to have to install the recover disks on your computer and start over. Nothing can be deleted pernamently on your hard drive, so you can get it back, but for it will cost you thousands of dollars like I said.

Answer 4

Send your hard drive in to a hard drive repair company, such as drivesavers. http://www.drivesavers.com. They are amazing at what they can do, but it can be expensive. The most important thing to do is STOP using your computer. The more you use it, it will keep overwriting your old data and there's a less chance you will have to recover your data.

Answer 5

Don't load anything on your computer or change it in any way, otherwise you could lose even more.

There are software packages that you can buy to help with this. There are also data recovery services. I think that iomega's is probably pretty good:
http://www.iomegadatarecovery.com/

Answer 6

On some computers there is a system call GoBack in which you can go back to whenever you want on your computer and anything you did on the computer like erased nething, it will all come back. If you have it i, it should appear when you first start your computer up and its says press f4 for options on wat time to go back to.

Answer 7

how did you clean your computer? if you deleted and emptied your recycle bin its too late because I'm sure you didn't set a system restore point but if you did you could restore it and if you forgot to empty your recycle bin it could be there

Answer 8

quick build a time machine



actually my brother is a computer whiz i will ask him tomorrow
he is a software writer for GE

Answer 9

data recovery sofware