Last January I began to have problems with my computer. I had a load of work saved onto my hard-drive and whenever i started the pc up it would freeze and a message would come up saying something about problem with 'Woal'?

I asked a friend to look at it and he told me the only solution was to flatten it and start from the beginning again! i asked him if my work would be saved and he assured me it would be somewhere in the depths of the pc memory . . I haven't been able to retrieve it yet and was wondering if any computer whizz's out there may have any advice for me?

so what your saying is you formatted your hard drive and reinstalled windows, and now you cant find the work that your mate said would still be there? If thats the case then Im afraid your "mate" was talking out of his arse. Formatting the drive will delete *everything* that was on there. You should have either partitioned your drive first with partition magic and copied all the stuff you wanted to keep to the new partition then just formatted the old one, or backed up all your work to cd or floppys. You might be able to get it back with some kind of file recovery/undelete tool, but I cant off-hand think of the name of one, and Im pretty sure that to get one that would actually work wouldnt be cheap anyway.

this software (http://www.datarecoverysoftware.co.uk/) might be able to recover your data, but, as I said, its not cheap, and for your 90 quid its not even guranteed to work, If your new install of windows has written over the sectors your work was saved to then Im afraid theyre gone for good. I think that mate of yours owes you a good few pints for this.

cheers slh73, it's not very comforting news but i dont know what else to do. What kind of thing do the police use when they're checking for deleted files on peoples pc's. . if they can get information back then surely my work should be retrievable?

Originally posted by Lestat
cheers slh73, it's not very comforting news but i dont know what else to do. What kind of thing do the police use when they're checking for deleted files on peoples pc's. . if they can get information back then surely my work should be retrievable?
The difference with that sort of software is that the police rarely need a complete file... fragments are usually enough.. and a format is pretty complete depening on the type of format..

Unless you want to fork about £500+ to get a professional data recovery firm to handle things for you, you're blown.. :(

I'm not allowed to post with just a one word answer so here goes: . . . bugger.

It's easy for me to say this now, I know. But it makes sense to back up all your work. It really is tragic to lose so much stuff and I feel for you.

Thanks Sam, I've since found this new thing where you can save all your work at a certain point so if ever you have to run the restore disk it will be able to start it from there. I also save most to floppy now too.
Funny how you never really think of these things & take it for granted till it's too late.

Hi Lestat,

You've learnt the nasty lesson of modern technology which is....make backups. Anything you value should exist in at least two PHYSICAL places - one on your hard disc and one on floppy or CDROM. Heck, if you can't manage anything else e-mail it to a Hotmail account!

Depending upon what they're looking for the Police and other security organisations use a number of tools that can attempt to retrieve data. In some cases, it IS posisble to retrieve data that appears to have been written over, BUT the kit used is based on quantumn effect magnetometers that detect the residual magnetism of 'bit' on the disc. Not the sort of thing you'll get used to rescue your files.....:-) This is why secure deletion of files requires multiple over-writes of the data on the disc. It's also the reason why the British Army method of permanently deleting a hard disc's worth of data is to use an angle grinder or a thermite charge...:-)

Seriously, if your PC has a CD Writer attached, get a pile of reasonable quality CDRWs and each week pull the whole of your 'My Documents' folder to a CDROM. (Assuming you're running Windows). Make sure you write all your data to that directory and you should have a secure copy for the future.

Hope you can sort something out.

Joe

DVD is now a viable backup solution, with over 4gb of capacity and disks that cost less than a quid.

it is, and I use it myself. However, youve first got to shell out about 60-70 quid for the drive. When you consider that a CDRW drive can be bought for a little as 25 quid, and the disks for about 20p each, its first worth considering if youd actually use a DVDRW drive for anything else, and if its worth spending the money on one.

To be fair it's worth getting BOTH drives...

DVD for full system ghost images and the cd-writer for incrimental backups of files on a more regular basis...

As you've already been told letstat unless you wanna cough some money up chances are it's gone forever. Thing that gets me is people telling him to back up, don't you think he's already worked that one out? There's no point telling him to do something that he's already well aware he failed to do - no need to rub it in eh?

Originally posted by fnkysknky
As you've already been told letstat unless you wanna cough some money up chances are it's gone forever. Thing that gets me is people telling him to back up, don't you think he's already worked that one out? There's no point telling him to do something that he's already well aware he failed to do - no need to rub it in eh?

Worth pointing out though as there will undoubtedly be another time when backups need to be made. More a gentle reminder for next time than a rubbing it in for this time, IMO.

you could try www.download.com and do a search

you may find some software which has a trial option

Most data recovery progs that do have a trial option will only let you recover 1 or 2 files, and have a limit on the size of those files as well. Belive me, Ive tried lots of them. Learned my lesson from it though.

your friend would be correct if you had two partitions, one for the data,whereas the other for the operating system. Yet if you had one partition, then you have simply overwritten your old data

The difference with that sort of software is that the police rarely need a complete file... fragments are usually enough.. and a format is pretty complete depening on the type of format..

Unless you want to fork about £500+ to get a professional data recovery firm to handle things for you, you're blown.. :(
I have spent 290 pounds only!!