Guess who’s harddrive was reformatted last night… yep, mine.
Background story:
I was gone all day. In my absence, there was a bad storm. My brother was booting up the computer, then realized there was thunder outside, and so wanted to turn it off. Dad says “wait till it finishes booting up” then the power goes out.
When the computer is turned back on, the mouse isn’t recognized and there may have been other symptoms, I don’t know, I wasn’t there. Dad decides this is a job for the “system recovery disk”. The disk reformats the hard drive, and installs all the junk that comes with the computer.
Then I get home. All my brother’s mp3’s are gone, my careful catelogue of my science fiction book collection is gone, hours of hard work, gone. Dad’s unapologetic. He’s reinstalled one thing: his game. I’m pissed. He has done nothing to fix the system, he doesn’t even realize the modem’s fried. As far as he’s concerned, the only purpose of the computer is to let him play “Magesty”.
This isn’t the first time he’s done this. The first time, Mom lost 4 years of Quick Books records.
So, is there any way I can get my data back? I’m running WinME and have a 32GB harddrive with two 16GB partitions. I’d really prefer a free program… I’m broke, and I doubt Dad’ll pay for anything.
I think you’re screwed. Tha FAT’s been written over and a lot of the disk too. I don’t think there’s any simple way. The moral of the story is to (a) make regular backups and (b) not let other people near your computer. I feel your pain though.
There is no simple way. But there is way. You would need to contact some storage specialist who can retreive the data for you. I don’t think it’s cheap though. Worth investigating though.
No, you’re pretty much screwed unless you want to invest up to several hundred dollars for data recovery. There are places that can recover even data that has been overwritten, but these are the most expensive.
1: Get your own PC. They are outrageously cheap nowadays.
2: The loss of your data was not really your dad’s “fault”, it’s yours. The only person you should be pissed at is yourself. Lots of things can trash data besides parents with re-install disks. Any valuable data should be backed up. If this has happened before you had plenty of notice that it might happen again. Look into using CDR’s or an outboard USB/firewire hard drive to back things up.
Also, it might be a good idea to purchase a second harddrive to store all your data on. Of course, making backups is still a good thing to do, but with a second harddrive, system restores won’t wipe the data on that drive.
So you’re saying that anyone could come in and erase everything on your PC and you’d lose nothing of value? That, if you did lose something, you’d only have yourself to blame? I don’t think so.
And the first time this happened, I was 10. That’s 8 years ago, and it didn’t happen to the home computer. It was thought that Dad had learned his lesson. I believe I can be excused for not adopting data-protection precautions based on that incident.
I’m mostly resentful of my dad because I’m the one asked to install everything from Mom’s new hard drive to the new modem we need. I’m the one asked to fix everything from a cd drive not being recognized to html files not saving properly. I do everything. Then, when something like this happens, he can’t even wait for me to get home. That’s what I’m angry about, not the loss of my data.
DarkMika, I agree you have very good reason to be angry. I think your dad was totally irresponsible. OTOH, as has been pointed out, the data could have been lost for many other reasons and if you want to secure it you should make regular backups. It is your fault that you do not have a backup. It is your father’s fault that you need a backup in this instance.
What you have learned is a valuable lesson. Never put power into the hands of people who cannot control it properly. My father and I were running a computer business out of our home and one of our customers kept reformatting her hard drive every day. Sometimes several times a day. We ended up giving her a blank cd faked to look like her restore cd, and when it would not run she would call us so we could tell her not to reformat.
In your case, you need a computer for yourself. Once you have that, you can become a professional windows troubleshooter and tell your family to reformat and reinstall windows every time something goes wrong.
On the subject of your data… it is completely gone. Nothing can be done for it short of professional help, which is hit-or-miss even then. To prevent more trouble, hide the restore disk and set yourself up with a system admin account. If your father only cares about Majesty (a good game, actually) then he will be fine with not being able to screw the computer again.
Only if you’re putting a copy of the data there. If one decides to put all of their important data on the second hard drive to begin with, it’s not the same thing as a backup.
Me, I have one harddrive for OS and program files. OS has its own partition, so that, in the event that I have to reinstall my OS, the data associated with my program files will stay intact (except for registry entries). Oh yes, this harddrive is NTFS.
My second hard drive is FAT32, and I use it to store (not back up, but primary location) for all kinds of data. My reasoning is that I can swap that harddrive to another computer and have quick access to my data should something catastrophic happen to the primary harddrive and/or the computer in general.
Thirdly, I make backups of the really important stuff to CD-RW using packet writing software. I somehow doubt that I’d have the presence of mind to save my backup CDs in the event of something like a house fire, but it still lends a little peace of mind.
My advice to DarkMika: If you have the actual OS install CD, then destroy the system restore CD. Snap the sucker in half and throw it away. That, at least, will prevent rougue restores by your father, and you can still use the OS install CD to reinstall the OS should the need arise. Or, if the restore CD is bootable (and won’t work unless you boot off of it) then disable booting from CD in your BIOS, and then password protect your BIOS settings.
I’m sure you’re over the bad news by now. Un-formatting a disk is one thing. Un-formatting after stuff has been written over top of it is night to impossible. There are some software packages that claim to be able to do it, but YMMV. If your father is unapologetic now, I doubt he’d let you mess around with it that way. There are places you can send drives to have data recovered (the same places you send them after fires, floods, etc), but it’s expensive. My friend wants 30gigs recovered, and after hearing the prices, I’ve put a 120Gig drive in my “router” machine to do backups onto. It’s cheaper than recovery, and a darn sight easier too.
Yes, that’s absolutely correct. I’d have to spend some time downloading some software patches, but I wouldn’t lose a single byte of my personal files. This is what doing backups is all about. I keep a CD-RW in the drive, and I’ve got a little batch file that copies my most-often-updated files to that disk. Whenever I alter some other files, I open Windows Explorer, and quickly copy them to the CD. It’s never more than 15 minutes out of date.
This paranoia comes from spending many long years as a sysadmin, and repeatedly dealing with sobbing users who did things like keeping all of their active project files on things like floppy disks, with no other copies. Great strategy: pick the least reliable medium, and put all of your critical stuff on it!
In your case, keeping everything on the hard drive, with no backups, should have been only moderately dangerous, but with your dear father’s history, the risk level went way up, and you had fair warning!
In cidentally, regarding various people’s advice to copy things onto a second system hard disk: don’t do it, especially if your father is going to keep using that computer - and especially especially if you’re going to keep using WinME, which has no security to speak of. Two hard disks in the same computer can get trashed just as easily as one hard disk, and if you think your second HD is a reliable backup, you may be lazy about really securing your data. Instead, it’s best to just make unerasable CD-R images of your important stuff, 700MB at a time, with incremental backups in between on CD-RWs, Zip Disks, a USB HD - anything that cannot be trashed by the most idiotic of idiots. The basic standard here is “must not be left attached to your computer”.
Oh, and if it’s your computer, and your father trashed it, you should cut him off from using it. If it’s dad’s computer, it’s time to get a new computer.
It’s the family computer, meaning it’s mostly Dad and the brother’s. I only use it only for my book catalogue because, of the 3 computers I have access to, only it has access to the internet and access to my books.
Thanks, everyone, for your replies. I’ve learned my lesson. From now on, I’ll always keep a back-up of my catalogue on my own, personal computer, which has the advantage of being only one room away from the books, but the major disadvantages of no modem, no phoneline, the inability to handle anything as stimulating as the internet, and being stuck in an infinite restart loop at the moment.
(BTW, I am saving up for a real computer, and was out earning money when Dad {who is really pretty computer literate, and thought to be trust-worthy, reformatting hard drives being his only major fault} pulled this stunt.)
Wait a sec, what sort of formating was done? Was every thing completly writen over and erased, or was it just a simple format that cleared the boot record? If it was the later your data (minus anything copied over by your dads game) is still in there and should be recoverable by anyone with the right software.
No, a Restore Cd, ala Compaq, formats the drive then reinstalls the software as it came from the factory. In other words, a great deal of overwriting takes place. Your data is screwed at that point.
Norton System Works has a program called “Undelete” that works great on formatted floppy’s. I’ve had some luck on harddrives but it’s a really tedious process. It will run off the CD without installing it. If your “System Restore” only replaced system files and overwritten much you might get lucky. Especially on your second partition. When you format a disk it does not erase all the files but rather “unlinks them”. In Windows it merely changes the first letter of the filename from the alphabet character to * or ? whichever. “Undelete” searches for these characters and replaces them with an alphabet character.