I have lost count of the number of times in these forums I have trumpeted from the rooftops the blissfully useful TrueImage - till now.

I bought a new drive, and imaged the old drive onto my massive 500gig USB external SATA drive, which was about (yes 'was') 80% full with data archives, drive images of the living room Shuttle, Music PC which I have just installed Win7/64 bit on, work PC and one I had just built for a disabled friend.

So I made the image and then put in the new hard drive, and told Trueimage to recover the image from the external USB to the new drive. But somehow, and yes I suppose it must have been a fault on my part, but instead of recovering to the new drive - it recovered to my 500 external drive though how I don't know because the drive I pointed it to the drive which was reprted as the new 160gig drive and not the 500gig of the external USB drive, so it copied/recovered the image back to itself somehow?

Now I have lost so much data my stomach is in knots, and the whole point of buying the new drive was to freeup more space to make sure I had a full backup of everything, now all I have on my 500gig drive is a Win7 installation, everything else is gone.

If I had a butler I would ask him to decanter me some port and pass me the loaded Smith & Wesson, closing the door on his way out. :-(

I cannot imagine there is any software that will unformat a drive, that is hope against hope

Depending on the file system, actually, sometimes you can indeed undo a format, particularly where the files were written as a continuous write (so there is no fragmentation), as something like a disk image will usually be, details are highly file system specific and worst case involve the use of a sector editor.

Finger trouble like that is why a single level of backup is not that helpful, having a couple of sets of backup media and rotating them (including at least one kept off site) is much safer.

Regards, Dan (Who got backup religion big time some years back, the learning experience involved a week of staring at a sector editor while carefully reconstructing a file system).

--------------------
Audiophiles use phono leads because they are unbalanced people!

I've successfully recovered everything by using

http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizardpro/

It's expensive ($90 for pro version). It literally took around 16 hours to chug its way through the disk, but it did find everything.

This was after deleting the wrong disk from the windows install menu, I hadn't actually written anything to the disk.

I did just see on it's page that it has an article on recovering from what you've done

http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/recover-ghosted-image-data.htm

and if I read the site properly, the demo will let you see what it can actually recover, so that you know in advance whether it's worth buying or not.

Hi -

that is a nightmare.

I am not sure if this will help for your situation but here goes. I once inadvertently deleted a large internal storage drive thus losing all data, or so I thought. I managed this stupidity by reformatting 1st thing before fully awake, stopped myself before actually starting the installation though - but as I say, partition deleted.. Doh!

Anyway - after looking at a few trial paid for programs which for me were universally useless, I chanced across TestDisk . A little freebie which after running overnight recovered the lot, &, as far as I'm aware, without a glitch.
Gotta be worth a shot before shelling out any hard earned in my (inexpert) opinion.


Anyway, it's full capabilities are beyond my ken, but.. it may work for you & if you try I hope it does.

--------------------
"The tech gets better, the user error remains the same.." Roberts Plant

Quote OneWorld:

---

But somehow, and yes I suppose it must have been a fault on my part, but instead of recovering to the new drive - it recovered to my 500 external drive

---

So, to be fair, this is a not a fault of TrueImage. It could have happened with any recovery software. It was simply a user error, and that's a constant 'danger' in anything we do.

It also highlights the fact that you actually don't have a proper backup regime. One backup is simply not enough (important data needs to reside in at least three places) - I'd urge you to set up a grandfather/father/son backup system before anything like this happens again. Hard drives are cheap enough now, so there's really no reason to risk losing data.

Sympathies though. Hopefully one of the ideas above may help.

--------------------
An Eagle for an Emperor, A Kestrel for a Knave.

Sorry to hear that OneWorld. Don't write anything to the disk until you've exhausted the possibilities of recovering it.

From this thread, it sounds like there might be some hope of getting at the data beyond the size of the restored image.

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=186409

Reminds me of the Benny Blanco interview in the current SOS, where his mentor Disco D's methods "included at one point erasing Blanco's entire hard drive, and at another throwing his CDs out of the window."

If you can't get it back, then take comfort from the liberating creative possibilities of a blank canvas.

Sheesh - bad luck.

It happened to me many years ago.

Now I work on the principle if I haven't got DATA in THREE separate physical locations (hard drives) then it's already lost!
It cost more to back-up to three discreet drives but it really is worth every penny.

Hope you get it sorted, losing DATA is really frustrating to say the least.

tf

gadzooks, they don't make Smith & Wessons like they used to, am still here!

Thank's very much everyone. Collating all the info you've given here, and coming across an old IDE external drive which had about 40% of what I'd lost, phew, and Recova, and taking comfort by those words - "consider the liberating impact of a blank canvas" which remined me, it's only data, in the greater scheme of things it's not as if I'm living Syria and have bigger fish to fry.

The reason for my buiying the external 500gig drive was to establish a more robust backup regime! But have gone out to buy another now so I'll have the 2 500gig drive with the files on each in future. Guess I really should have looked at buying a NAS with dual mirrored drives

NAS would not have saved you, RAID is about availability not backup!

The point of backup is that when you accidentally reformat a disk, or erase something critical you can restore from the backups, the point of RAID is that a disk failure does not force you to stop working until you can restore from backups....

Regards, Dan.

--------------------
Audiophiles use phono leads because they are unbalanced people!

Another free and very, very good tool is http://www.piriform.com/recuva and certainly another one to try.

--------------------
ScanProAudio & 3XS Audio Systems
ScanProAudio Blog

Quote Pete Kaine:

---

Another free and very, very good tool is http://www.piriform.com/recuva and certainly another one to try.

---

Thanks, I used Recuva, and I have managed to get back about 50% of the content, and 25% of that 50% is the ones I wanted back most.

For the rest the folder structure was over written so yes the files are there, but with so many associated files it is hard to know which files go in which folders.

The other files I can't get back are I kept a folder of all drivers I use on each of my PCs, so they are easy enough to get back. But what I did lose is all my incremental images for each of 3 machines so I might as well use the opportunity to upgrade all to Win7 and start with a blank canvas.

If anyone is interested, the free version of Acronis that they gave away some years ago now on a magazine, Acronis10, still works, even with Win7/64bit :-) Just be careful where yuo recover to

Quote OneWorld:

---

If anyone is interested, the free version of Acronis that they gave away some years ago now on a magazine, Acronis10, still works, even with Win7/64bit :-) Just be careful where yuo recover to

---

Many years ago I did the same sort of thing where I had two drives in a machine, one being the OS drive in need of a clean install and the second being full of work and projects. I restored my OS drive image but hit the wrong target drive and took out the project one by mistake.

Not to worry I thought, I have a back up... which when I tried to restore it I realised that image I had was corrupted as the drive was failing.

Cue sound of harddrive bouncing off the wall.

Two lessons learnt that day :

Check your images occasionally to make sure they are working correctly.
Always remove/disconnect any drive from a machine that isn't the clone or master in a backup restore routine.

--------------------
ScanProAudio & 3XS Audio Systems
ScanProAudio Blog

Quote Pete Kaine:

---

Quote OneWorld:

---

If anyone is interested, the free version of Acronis that they gave away some years ago now on a magazine, Acronis10, still works, even with Win7/64bit :-) Just be careful where yuo recover to

---

Many years ago I did the same sort of thing where I had two drives in a machine, one being the OS drive in need of a clean install and the second being full of work and projects. I restored my OS drive image but hit the wrong target drive and took out the project one by mistake.

Not to worry I thought, I have a back up... which when I tried to restore it I realised that image I had was corrupted as the drive was failing.

Cue sound of harddrive bouncing off the wall.

Two lessons learnt that day :

Check your images occasionally to make sure they are working correctly.
Always remove/disconnect any drive from a machine that isn't the clone or master in a backup restore routine.

---

As it happens, I too have a similar sort of setup, where I have a PC with slide in/out caddies, so I can try out various operating systems and hardware setups. And just out of curiosity I tried to recover an image yesterday before I added new hardware and then I would make new image with the new hardware added.

Result - Image Corrupted! Goodness knows how, the machine has been stable, images on a separate HDD, PC not connected to internet etc. I do have backups of that machine fortunately.

Is the built Win7 imaging software reliable?

I also tried DriveXML in the past and on recovering, the boot drive report cannot find NTOS kernel, or words to that effect, whatever, it wouldn't boot

Am trying out Macrium Reflect

Quote OneWorld:

---

Am trying out Macrium Reflect

---

I switched to Macrium reflect about 6 weeks ago after using true image for years. Having been let down by Acronis numerous times in the past, i still went back to it like a devoted masochist.

The final straw was when my router packed in & windows 7 wouldnt work with my modem......i loaded my xp image untill the new router arrived. When i tried to reload my win 7 image the bloody thing refused to boot with various error messages. Had to do a reinstall.

Reflect, after a few weeks testing etc,seems more reliable so i bought it after evaluating the trial version. I use the "Win PE" thing that is also usefull.