Advice on Data Recovery on Win 7..?

[Karlos Santos]

Okey dokey,

My mate just called and hes deleted 135gb of music of his Win 7 laptop.
You know me, im a Mac guy but i want to help him.

He had all his music on the Desktop, but it in the Bin and emptied it after getting bad advice from someone that assumed he had checked the option to copy music to iTunes on Import. He's done nothing to the system since then apart from shut down and restart.
Since then iTunes shows no music so i guess hes trashed his iTunes Library.xml as well. Thats not much of an issue cus he had no playlists.

Ive downloaded Recuva and TestDisk to see if i can recover the music.

So... Windows guys what are the chances of this turning out ok.
Which app do you recommend.

And please please, usually this is were some smart-ass Windows guy speaks down to me by stating things that are supposedly obvious but mean little to me so if you cant be polite and understanding at the fact that i dont use Windows, just dont post.


Thanks in advance.

[nthalp]

recuva works pretty well for the most part, as long as he stops doing things that write to the drive, less of a chance of overwriting things

[bartboy]

Stop using the hard dive completely. Take it out if he can or boot from a USB stick. Once you have either booted from a USB stick or hooked it up to a IDE/SATA to USB Cable then use Recuva. Recuva's is free and has always done the job for me. There's a good chance he won't get it all back but he should be able to get over 95% of it back if he stops using the hard drive.

Hope this helps.

[Karlos Santos]

Cheers guys.
Will Recuva do a decent enuff job if we dont boot from USB and just run it on the hard drive. He seems less concerned about it as i first thought.

Gonna do it tomorrow and ive told him not to use the laptop until i arrive.

Booting from USB stick..? Any decent guide that you recomemnd..? Im not really looking forward to messing around in his bios anyway. Those days are long behind me ;-)

[nthalp]

had the same thing happen to my boss last week.. running recuva through standard windows (instead of a live cd or usb boot) works, although generally not recommended from a "IT admin" point of view. i suggest a deep scan (which will take forever, but a better chance of maximizing how much you get out)