recovering moved files

[_deano]

a days back i moved a chuck of photos (around 70mb) from one hard drive to another via cut and pasting. The hard drive that the files were cut to has now decided to give up and i can't retrieve these photos. Would i be right in thinking that i should be able to use a file recovery application to find the photos that were cut from the original HD, or will the recovery application only work with deleted files?

[holloway_dave]

Cutting and deleting is the same thing as far as recovering files.

When you delete a file, it's not actually physically removed from the disk - it's just removed from the 'index' table. This is why a recovery program can sometimes recover it.

You should stop using the drive which you need to recover straight away and try a recovery. If you continue to use it then there is a greater and greater chance that the deleted files will be overwritten by something else.

[_deano]

nothing has been written to the original drive as it's an external USB HD. I thought the same too about the file, but i've used one app and it doesn't show any of the files or folders that were once on it. Could it just be the app that is not good enough to find that pics?