Laptop Crashed, all data lost - BEST RECOVERY COMPANY??

Laptop Crashed, all data lost - BEST RECOVERY COMPANY??

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Discussion

S6PNJ

5,157 posts

280 months

Friday 28th April 2017
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Morningside said:
There is a PH'er that does data recover.
Marshalla is the chap on here - send him a PM and see what he can do for you.

dmsims

6,450 posts

266 months

Friday 28th April 2017
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The Spruce goose said:
yes I bothered to, the op said the data hadn't been rewritten so again don't see the issue with what I have written
So nothing was written to the disk when:

R11ysf said:
Our IT guy at work tried to recover it with a Windows 10 media disk and despite it saying that it would save all data in "windows.old" file this appears to be empty and there is now 20gb in a recovery partition that wasn't there before all these files now appear empty.

mikeiow

5,286 posts

129 months

Friday 28th April 2017
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R11ysf said:
Yes essentially this. In today's world you read about a celeb here or there putting in their laptop to get fixed and having their photos leaked or the repair guy finding photos of child p**n etc so it's abundantly clear that they look through the data. My concern is when they find a large file entitled "Private Banking" they are obviously going to look through it and then you are totally down to the honesty of the individual repair man. I mean if I saw a file called "Coca-Cola Secret Recipe" I'm going to look at it and this is my concern.

With regards to backing up of data I have 90% of it from the old laptop and I looked at creating a recovery drive but didn't really understand how to do it. I just can't believe that they don't give you a simple old recovery disk anymore. My Xp laptop lasted 10 years and was still working well until the charging pin physically broke off through overuse and the modern windows 10 craps itself in 1 year.

Thanks for all the suggestions, I guess I'll have to just go and speak to some people directly and see what I think of them and then take a leap of faith.
Good luck!

Have to say, the power & simplicity of Time Machine was a serious part of my decision over recent years to move to Apple. There is quite a bit about the Apple ecosystem I do NOT like.....& given apple kit is 2-3x capital cost more than windows, not a cheap decision, but time-wise an easy one. I had used connected (with work) and some other windows tools, but none worked really well - even just manually dumping important stuff regularly would sometimes feel better, but it ain't easy. People tell mw Win10 has some decent native tools, but I haven't got a Win10 machine (& in fact updating a 1 year old Win8 to Win10 was a final nail in the coffin for me - took about 5 hours, MULTIPLE reboots, just painful....then slower afterwards despite what people said!!)



mmm-five

11,227 posts

283 months

Friday 28th April 2017
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I do hope you're successful in getting all/most of your data back.

All PCs/Macs can crash.

First step is to simply restart and see if it starts up again (this normally fixes 99% of cases).

Next step (for me) would be to use another boot drive (in my case a bootable stick/drive) to start up and see if the internal HDD is visible. If so, copy/clone data.

Only then would I start running potentially ruinous diagnostics/fixer tools, as every time you use the HDD you increase the chances of losing data.

BUT, as you've been told before, and hopefully now realise, there is no 'guarantee' on when something will go bad. So please, sort out your backup strategy BEFORE you have the same issue again.

It doesn't have to be onerous, and can be set up to whatever level of risk you are happy with (i.e. are you comfortable with losing 1 hour/day/week of data). Mine's set up for incremental hourly backups on my work machine (daily on my home machine), but also have a weekly rotated copy on portable 1TB HDDs, and some 'recent files' on dropbox/onedrive/ftp.

Edited by mmm-five on Friday 28th April 10:32

andrewrob

2,912 posts

189 months

Friday 28th April 2017
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Wondering if one of the HP tools you used has restored a factory image onto the drive so when your IT guy has gone to install windows 10 with the media disc which would put everything in windows.old its putting the files of the factory restore in there instead (which there isn't going to be any of) as your old windows installation has been erased when it imaged the factory install back on it

dmsims

6,450 posts

266 months

Friday 28th April 2017
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mikeiow said:
Have to say, the power & simplicity of Time Machine was a serious part of my decision over recent years to move to Apple.
This is pointless in this context

Time machine does not magically just work. It has to be setup (just like any backup)

mikeiow

5,286 posts

129 months

Friday 28th April 2017
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dmsims said:
mikeiow said:
Have to say, the power & simplicity of Time Machine was a serious part of my decision over recent years to move to Apple.
This is pointless in this context

Time machine does not magically just work. It has to be setup (just like any backup)
Easy tiger - to be fair, your comment is equally pointless with only that context!
So far you seem to have chipped in with disparaging remarks about letting an IT guy at work take a look - sounds like a reasonable first step to me!

I did start with "Apologies, I am more Mac aware", & then tried to make some useful suggestions about finding a local firm!

FWIW, & yes, useless to OP here, sorry, but I would say that setting up time machine is massively easier than any window-based "plug the disk in and have it work" system I have ever seen: not sure if you have used it, but I plug in when at my desk, don't notice any performance issues, and can easily restore file or folder etc from many previous points. Kids away at Uni, I know if they plug their disks in, then in the worst case scenario, their data will be protected.
Okay, perhaps not THE worst case - if their room is burgled and disk+laptop stolen, they are stuffed, hence my suggestion for cloud backup tools as well....

Tried crashplan years ago when I was on windows....which was okay but a bit clunky. Which Windows mechanisms would you recommend?
Feel free to make some useful suggestions....

NoIP

559 posts

83 months

Friday 28th April 2017
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R11ysf said:
Yes essentially this. In today's world you read about a celeb here or there putting in their laptop to get fixed and having their photos leaked or the repair guy finding photos of child p**n etc so it's abundantly clear that they look through the data. My concern is when they find a large file entitled "Private Banking" they are obviously going to look through it
Please tell me you didn't actually put all your financial details, log-ins and passwords in one big unencrypted file and named it "Private Banking"? wobble With all due respect, no-one is that dumb, are they? If you did actually do this, did it never enter your head whilst creating it that it wasn't a good idea?

saaby93

32,038 posts

177 months

Friday 28th April 2017
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NoIP said:
Please tell me you didn't actually put all your financial details, log-ins and passwords in one big unencrypted file and named it "Private Banking"? wobble With all due respect, no-one is that dumb, are they? If you did actually do this, did it never enter your head whilst creating it that it wasn't a good idea?
It's not too bad idea

The worst idea is putting that all together in place that nobody else is bound to find it

Three months later, now where did I put all that?

NoIP

559 posts

83 months

Friday 28th April 2017
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saaby93 said:
It's not too bad idea

The worst idea is putting that all together in place that nobody else is bound to find it

Three months later, now where did I put all that?
Seriously? Christ, don't people know how to use the brain they're born with anymore? There are endless possibilities to "hide" stuff in a PC file system with a little creativity but leaving them in plain sight in a folder called Private Banking is about as dumb as it gets. Even for the most technophobic person there are a myriad of programs that manage passwords, either locally on the host PC or remotely. Actually scrap that. I can see the user would probably write the master password for KeePass or something similar in a Notepad txt file and leave it on the desktop called privatebankingmasterpassword.txt. hehe

Thorburn

2,398 posts

192 months

Saturday 29th April 2017
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andrewrob said:
Wondering if one of the HP tools you used has restored a factory image onto the drive so when your IT guy has gone to install windows 10 with the media disc which would put everything in windows.old its putting the files of the factory restore in there instead (which there isn't going to be any of) as your old windows installation has been erased when it imaged the factory install back on it
This. People saying blame the IT guy are likely wrong. It sounds like the HP recovery software was run by the OP and imaged the HDD back to factory.

Get the drive out of the system and either to a data recovery form or run a full scan over it with Minitool Power Data Recovery and see what it can find.

schmunk

4,399 posts

124 months

Saturday 29th April 2017
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I would boot the laptop with a Linux flash drive and have a poke about to see if the files are still there. Any half-competent "IT person" should be able to do this.

R11ysf

Original Poster:

1,931 posts

181 months

Tuesday 2nd May 2017
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NoIP said:
Please tell me you didn't actually put all your financial details, log-ins and passwords in one big unencrypted file and named it "Private Banking"? wobble With all due respect, no-one is that dumb, are they? If you did actually do this, did it never enter your head whilst creating it that it wasn't a good idea?
No I didn't, it was in a password protected folder locker folder.

Penelope Stopit

11,209 posts

108 months

Tuesday 2nd May 2017
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schmunk said:
I would boot the laptop with a Linux flash drive and have a poke about to see if the files are still there. Any half-competent "IT person" should be able to do this.
This is very good advice

I wouldn't be rushing off to a data recovery company if I was you
Data that has been overwritten has gone forever, you can only get back what has not been overwritten

AndrewEH1

4,917 posts

152 months

Wednesday 3rd May 2017
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Aye? Do you now?

Edited by Jack Mansfield on Wednesday 3rd May 12:23