My dad formatted his pc and reinstalled windows and lost all his files. Can i help him recover them?

Question

My Dad recently wanted to format his PC and reinstall the OS (xp pro) and backed up all his media to a DVD, unfortunately the DVD became corrupted or damaged and hence he's now lost all the media which contained precious family photos and videos, all his tax information etc etc

Now he told me he did this last night, and I’ve told him not to install anything else.

Can anyone advise me the best way to attempt to recover any of these files as I don’t have the first clue what to do or program to use. (I'm willing to pay to recover this so any file recovery software license fees ill pay)

All comments much appreciated.

Answer 1

I had the same problem recently and tried the following program:
http://www.smart-projects.net/
It's called "IsoBuster". It was able to get some files back, however, I wasn't able to recover all the files. I tried the dvd on a different computer too which surprisingly was able to read some parts of it.

Answer 2

If he truly formatted his hard drive, it will not be possibly to recovery the files from the hard drive.

On the other hand, if he "quick formatted" the drive (where the DIRECTORY is all that is actually formatted) then with Norton Disk Doctor or some similar utility you may be able to recover some of the files from the hard drive.

As to trying to recover some files from the DVD, your family has learned a lesson in a very hard way: Always check to ensure a backup is reliable BEFORE you try to rely on it to restore data. Depending on how the DVD is corrupted, and professional may be able to take an ISO image of the DVD and repair it and then burn another DVD, but this is a VERY TIME CONSUMING and VERY EXPENSIVE process.

Good luck to you and your family in your attempts at recovering at least some of these files.

Answer 3

From your information, he attempted to back up files to a cd and did not validate that the back ups were valid.

He then reformatted the Hard Drive (HD), reinstalled XP Pro and presumably his programs. After that he tried to copy the cd's files back to the HD and found out the cd files were damaged and unreadable.

Once you reformat the HD, you cannot recover things as the files were wiped clean in that process.

I doubt you can recover the cd files either.

I wish I could be more optamistic but I just cannot.

Answer 4

Once a dvd or cd is burned the files are unwrittable. The dvd or cd must remain "healthy" in order to get back the files. Once a dvd or cd is "not healthy" nothing really can be done to recover the files. Try loading the disc on another computer to see if it happens there as well. If it doesn't... The disc is gone. If it does... copy to that computer and try burning again.

Answer 5

formatting a hard drive wipes it clean. data is gone. it would cost a LOT of money to even try to retrieve anything on the drive and probably would not be successful. sorry.