Undelete

I accidently deleted a file that was very important to me, then I emptied the trash bin, i then tried "restore" but it failed, all I got was empty boxes for the file and subdirectories

Is there any way I can recover these files, it happened on
August 31 5 days ago, I have purchased a program called
"Undelete" but I have had no success with it, although I am not familiar with how to go about it

Any help or suggestiond will be appreciated
Paul

 

Best hope when this happens is to not use the computer at all except for what is needed to recover, untill recovery is complete if recovery is possible.

If you used your computer normally for these last 5 days. Recovery becomes less possible.

Getting the empty boxes you referred to again steps further away from recovery.

If you have installed or uninstalled a large application. A step farther away.

If you have per chance ran a scandisk (CHKDSK in 2k Xp) and /or defrag then it will be almost impossible.

So how many steps above have you taken away from recovery?

And is this FAT32 or NTFS partitions?

Mike

 

I saw this little utility mentioned in another thread here and it worked for me. Download it to a floppy and run the self extractor to a floppy to avoid writing to hard drive if using the PC you want to recover the file on. Then read the readme file for use instructions.

http://hccweb1.bai.ne.jp/~hcj58401/

Hope this helps.

 

BillB - interesting program and thanks for the link. The price is certainly right.

But the "how far away" stuff that Mike posted should allow Paul to figure out if the file stands a chance of being recovered intact or even pieces of it. As follows:

When you "delete" a file normally, two things happen.

- First, a pointer to the files location is placed in the recycle bin. Given that, the OS can "restore" the file. Maybe.

- Next, the file table is modified so the normal pointer to the file location is removed and as far as the OS is concerned, that location on the drive is available for use.

The various "undelete" utilities are simply able to look on the drive and find where the file is. Delete didn't remove any part of the file itself - just the entry that tells the OS where to find it.

But if you've done anything that writes to the hard drive and part or all of the space occupied by your "deleted" file is used for storage of new data, the old content is no longer in existence.

A defrag will do the same thing usually since it moves lots of drive contents around and will usually place something eles where the old file was since the space is marked as unused.

Even if you don't do a full defrag, XP moves drive contents around while you are using the system to make storage more efficient and the longer you wait after a file is deleted, the more likely that it got "efficiented" out of existence.

 

I want to thank all who replied, but due to anxiety, I went beserk and did all the wrong things, and I now have given up hope on recovery, I was a dumb thing I did in deleting it anyway. The files were in the launch tool box along with a bunch of shortcuts, and without thinking I just deleted all of them.

Thank you, all of you, this place has a lot of nice people.

Paul Lambert

 

So sorry Froggy.

Try the recovery tool offered by Bill.

You may get something, and will have it later so it will be immediately available.

Mike