Data Recovery from moved SATA drives

[wolfhound]

In a previous post I talked about how my WD WorldBook had failed. Thankfully, I did not have it in a RAID configuration. Just two independent 1 TB drives. I have since moved the drives over to my XP MCE machine and have them being recognized by the OS. In order to do so I did a quick low-level format. I have run one freeware file recovery program to see if it would see anything and it did. I do have two questions before I continue.

First, can the files be recovered onto the same HDD as the were found?

Second, is there a program the locates them as the files type and names as they were before the recovery process began?

Thank you.

[Panama Red]

You can try the free stuff but I've had my best luck with Get Data Back. It'll cost a few bucks but it's worth every penny. It will display and recover your files just as they appeared. But I don't think any recovery software can write to the same drive.

[glc]

Correct, you cannot recover to the same drive. Also, if you did a format, the odds of getting the directory structures and filenames back are slim, you will be lucky just to get the raw data back.

[wolfhound]

I guess it is another lesson learned. In order for them to work in the XP box I had to format, so I selected quick format in hopes of being able to save some of the data. Folder structure is not that important but it appears that I acted too quickly.

Oh well, live and learn and see what Get My Data back can do for me.

[garys1n2]

Recently, I had to help my brother get some files back from a hard drive that went bad, and I used one endorsed by Seagate called "File Recovery for Windows" which also says it can recover files from a reformatted HD, files deleted through the recycle bin, etc, etc. Check out the information on the program at:

https://services.seagate.com/diysoftware.aspx

There is a free download that you can get that can identify whether the program can "see" the files, and if it can "see" them, it can get them. It costs $129 for the program, but definately worth it if you have files you need to recover. You can also use the program on any number of computers--not a one license, one computer type program.

Hope this helps you!

[glc]

I think the issue here might be the drives in that appliance were not formatted in a form that Windows could recognize. NAS boxes often use an embedded Linux operating system. Too bad - booting the computer with a Linux live CD may have seen everything.