Data recovery, Urgent

[rabinzx]

I was helping a friend deleting windows 7 on his bootcamp. She told me after that, merge the empty space back to Mac volume. The computer is Macbook in 2008~09, 160 toshiba hard drive, running leopard. While deleting, I notice the volume of location where win7 installed is kind of wired.

the bootcamp volume is located within Leopard's volume, and every time the computer restart, the "bootcamp" volume will show up on the desktop (even if I turned off SHOW hard disk on desktop in Finder).
And there is another small volume with bootcamp volume ( I remember it was 100mb)

First I checked bootcamp, and it didn't give me nothing, so I decided format the bootcamp volume along with the small volume.
Right after I delete the bootcamp volume, the system gives me error message. I thought it was because the small volume, so I delete the small one too. Then the two volume were combined.

next, I tried merge the empty volume into Mac's volume in Disk Utility, but system says "this partition canot be modified" so I have to restart see if it would let me merge after restart.
Just for the record, at this moment, the Mac system was perfectly fine.

After restart, screen says "error, cannot find system", so I tried Leopard installation CD, log into disk utility.
It shows ONLY one volume (the one I formated - bootcamp) under hard drive. And the size of it is 159gb out of 160gb.
I clearly remember the distribution before reboot was:
Hard Drive:
1. Mac - 99GB
2. Empty (bootcamp) - 60gb

Guess what? My friend just recall she had some important picture stuck in iPhoto.

Now, I am trying to recovery the volume by connecting the 2.5" notebook drive to my PC, but waiting for shipping of a 2.5/3.5 HDD adapter?

I know there is some command under Terminal that can fix some volume issues. But I dont know exactly what they are. Additional, I never used the "erase" function while formatting.

What should I do now? Can someone point me to the correct direction? What is the chance I recovering those pictures?

 

[jsmakkar]

Recuva is a good data recovery program http://www.piriform.com/recuva
You may download free version on your PC and try to recover those pictures - Good luck!!!

 

[rabinzx]

Recuva is a good data recovery program http://www.piriform.com/recuva
You may download free version on your PC and try to recover those pictures - Good luck!!!

Thanks, I am gona try that.
However, that is for windows. Would it understand Mac's language - unix , HFS/HFS ?

 

[jsmakkar]

This Recuva Link says:
What if I'm not running Windows?

Recuva only supports Windows right now, but if your missing data is on a USB drive, removable drive, or memory card, you can attach the media to a Windows PC and run Recuva to get back your files.

 

[yasir siddiqui]

I used a software and i get all my lost data again.
so you can try and get back your all data..


"Get data back"


http://download.cnet.com/GetDataBa [...] 61631.html

 

[rabinzx]

Dear rabinzx, the pictures you are trying to recover can be recovered easily and from any windows or Mac computer system. The only thing you should do is that not to use the volume from where the data is lost, after that get such data recovery tool which you can easily trust. Opt for any demo version when you download data recovery tool. The reason behind saying is that the demo version will provide you an idea by which you can easily get the preview of pictures which you have lost. Try it, may it works.

In my original post, I have already did what you said. But again, thank you for your friendly reminder.



I guess I just solved my own problem.
Here is the solution for those who suffered same pain.
For detail info, please visit my post in other forum:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=13949476#post13949476


After days of fighting with my lost volume, I was able to get all of my data back.


The tools I have used:
1. Disk Drill ( latest version1.5, Full version, also called Pro version)
http://www.cleverfiles.com/
2. Data Rescue 3.2 full version (latest version able at this time is 3.2.1)
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php
3. FileSalvage (latest version 7.0 Full version)
http://subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1
4. Minitool Mac Data recovery 2.0 (free version --- limited to 1GB data recovery)
http://mac.powerdatarecovery.com/


Here is the full story:


First, Let me start with explaining how these data recovery tool works:
(Data Rescue and FileSalvage works almost the same)
Data Rescue will recovery your lost/deleted data, and sort them into different categories(like picture, movies, documents). Then it will do a deeper level recovery, and try to show found data in the original path.


So basically you will have two sets of data:
1. randomly allocated, sort by data kinds.
2. re-map data into original path.


Next, The system would ask you to select the data will recover.
At this point, the system would also ask you if you want to save session, PLEASE CLICK "SAVE".


What it does is it basically create links between "Found data" and "the data location on the disk". So next time, you want to recover different data on the same disk, you don't have to go through the painful hours of waiting. One way to look at these sessions is to see them as a "Catalog" that has all the page number for your "Book" (disk).


I. Comparison between Data Rescue and FileSalvage:
Data Rescue has two sets of data; however, I only found randomly allocated data on FileSalvage.


II. Comparison between Data Rescue and Minitool data recovery:
Minitool is small and smart recovery tool. Since I didn't have the full version and not willing to spend another 3 hrs on something I can only recover 1GB.
Hope someone who used it before can give some opinion.


III. Last, I proudly to introduce you my life saver "Disk Drill"
I does the similar things as other tools, but it has two basic difference:
* It let you choose if you want to recover recent deleted data or deep disk scan
** It has its "Protection" feature. You can protect certain partition or disk in the future. For example, if you accidentally delete some data under a PROTECTED partition, or even you have had severe damage to the partition and lost the whole partition. You will be able to recover all the data as VERY FAST speed. In other word, you data is in good hands.


IV. Disk Drill and Data Rescue found same or similar amount of data, but Disk Drill was able to recover all the data( Both two sets of data). On the other hand, Data Rescue was only able to recover partial of Randomly allocated data.


For example:
There are some data under the Randomly Allocated Set was partially damage. A image file was only recovered half of the picture, a Word,Excel document were shown as strange code that does not make any sense.
Also, Data Rescue was not able to recover "the data under the original path" at All.

 

[rabinzx]

Best answer selected by rabinzx.

 

[jsmakkar]

Best answer selected by rabinzx.

n
nThank you!!!