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I am working on a laptop that had XP with a bad virus and a hard disc that does not power up from time to time... I wanted to recover ...
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  1. 06-15-2008 #1
    bujums
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    recover lost Data

    I am working on a laptop that had XP with a bad virus and a hard disc that does not power up from time to time... I wanted to recover the Documents, Pictures and Music. I Thought I got all the data, but after I reformatted and installed Kubuntu I noticed that some of the picture files were not on the USB that I had backed them too...

    #1 ? is there a way to get those picture now that Kubuntu is on the disk?

    #2 ? I am assuming that since I was getting some errors when I was backing up some pictures that those pictures are the ones that I no longer have. So is it just plan impossible?

    ps the hard disk still does not function consistently if that helps...

    thank you
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  2. 06-15-2008 #2
    devils casper
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    You formatted partitions and installed Kubuntu on it. Its not possible to recover data now.
    It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
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  3. 06-15-2008 #3
    bujums
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    ok... I guess it is not my fault that the owner of the computer never backed up any of these "important" pictures. Thank you!!!
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  4. 06-15-2008 #4
    i92guboj
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    Quote Originally Posted by bujums View Post
    I am working on a laptop that had XP with a bad virus and a hard disc that does not power up from time to time... I wanted to recover the Documents, Pictures and Music. I Thought I got all the data, but after I reformatted and installed Kubuntu I noticed that some of the picture files were not on the USB that I had backed them too...
    That's why it's not a good idea to plug an usb device off without using the "safely remove the device" option in windows, or unmounting it in linux.

    #1 ? is there a way to get those picture now that Kubuntu is on the disk?
    Stop using the disk right now. Then use some tool to find patterns on raw files, maybe it can detect some of these files and extract them, but this is not going to be possible for big files unless they are not fragmented. Files that can fit on a single sector have a much better chance of being recovered.

    I don't know of any tool to do so, but I know such tools do exist. For text files you could use a simple grep command on the device to search for fragments that you can remember (if any):

    Code:
    grep -n20 "your text" /dev/hda
    Some parts of the data might still be there. But the bits that have been overwritten are lost forever unless you can borrow technology from the NSA or the NASA :P

    Can Intelligence Agencies Read Overwritten Data?
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