Ed wrote:
The serious answer is: Very carefully!
Preferably using *another computer,* download and transfer to floppy this
tool:
Restoration
Download: http://hccweb1.bai.ne.jp/~hcj58401/REST2514.EXE
Info: http://hccweb1.bai.ne.jp/~hcj58401/
My writeup from http://aumha.org/freeware.htm:
"For 9x/NT/2K/XP. Restore deleted files that are no longer in the Recycle
Bin! When a file is deleted from your computer, its contents aren't
immediately destroyed. Its hard drive space is made available for use, but
until that space is overwritten, your old data is usually intact.
Restoration by Brian Kato recovers such files on either FAT or NTFS
partitions. Only 406 KB (or 200 KB for XP or 2K), it fits easily on a
floppy, or runs from your hard drive. Generally, the sooner you try to
restore a file, the more successful you'll be."
I still have an oldish article on data recovery (and specifically about this
utility) on my newsletter page: http://aumha.org/elist.htm -- here are the
main points:
Emergency file recovery requires more than the correct tool. It requires
knowing how file deletion occurs, and what you have to do to maximize the
chances of a successful recovery. See, when a file is deleted from your
computer, its contents aren't immediately destroyed. Windows simply marks
the hard drive space as being available for use by changing one character in
the file table so that the file entry won't be displayed in My Computer or a
commandline DIR command, etc. If you manage to start an undeletion process
before Windows uses that part of the hard drive to write a new file, all you
have to do is set that flag back to "on," and you get the file. Pretty cool,
eh?
Obviously, the sooner you try to restore a file, the more successful you'll
be. But stop a moment and think about the other things that could cause this
part of the hard drive to be overwritten. If your hard drive is pretty full,
the odds are much greater that Windows will grab your precious unallocated
space for its next write. Or, if you defrag the hard drive, count on all
used parts of the drive to be overwritten! For that matter, simply
**starting up Windows** or, to a lesser extent, **shutting down Windows**
causes many tiny files to be written. You really want to avoid these
processes if at all possible.
This is also one of the places where well-planned partitioning of your hard
drive has a huge advantage. Partitions **physically** mark off different
parts of the hard drive. If, for example, you have your data and program
files on their own separate partitions, and it's a data file that you want
to recover (which is usually the case), then Windows startup or shutdown
won't touch that part of the hard drive. If you have the swapfile / pagefile
on its own partition, and all of your directories for temporary files on
another, then these most-changing and most-written files also will be kept
from overwriting the part of the drive holding the files you want to
recover. However, if you take that 80 GB hard drive and make it all one big
single C: partition, then you run the risk of making your file unrecoverable
anytime the swapfile resizes, or any time Windows writes a temporary file of
any kind... and this could be pretty much at any moment whatsoever!
Partitioning gives enormous advantage in file recovery. I recommend you read
my article Planning Your Partitions (http://aumha.org/a/parts.htm) for more
ideas along these lines.
--
Jim Eshelman
MS-MVP, Windows Shell/User
http://aumha.org/
http://WinSupportCenter.com/
