Upon opening the Disk Mgnt program it prompts to "initialize" the disk, I chose not to do this for fear it would make the existing data unrecoverable. However, I've been unsuccessful in finding any other way to access the data.
I only want to recover my early "drawings" that I did as a kid in Microsoft Paint for sentimental reasons. The computer was running Windows 3.1 and I I think the default image format in Paint at the time was .BMP.
I "lost" the data on this hard drive when I was a kid and let a friend use my computer. I left the room for a few minutes and when I returned it would not boot into Windows, it was as if someone had deleted windows from the computer. My friend offered no explanation and never came clean if it was a "prank". After that, I only used the computer to play games and other programs that ran off of 3.5" floppies out of DOS. Because I never reformatted this drive, I'm hoping some of those original drawings are recoverable, even though they may have been deleted long ago.
Any ideas or tips for how to go about recovering these ancient memories from childhood would be very much appreciated. Help me Level1Tech community, you are my only hope.
Use a linux live cd and create an image of disk disk using dd or dd-rescue if you think the disk may be damaged. After that try to mount the image and see if you can see and access the file system, if you can you can copy whatever data you like off it, if you can't run testdisk on the image to try to recover any data.
Thanks for the quick reply! I will have to do some homework to implement that solution as I know virtually nothing about linux.
Does anyone have a windows-based solution?
I have tried running testdisk and the hard drive does not show up when I do so I wasn't able to use that program to recover the existing image on the old HD.
I HIGHLY recommend that you do what @HumbleStarship737 was recommending and use a linux live CD to DD the entire drive to a file. This way if you screw something on the drive up all the data will still be backed up.
DD basically copies every bit of data byte for byte to either another drive of to a file. Also, testdisk works better on linux than Windows.
Hey man, Yeah if you can create disk images and whatnot its a start, and depending on what the content from the disk is like you may have to use something such as Autopsy to extract it off. Have you ever used it? If not there is some great tutorials on youtube to show you how to!
Once you have a backup look into using Testdisk to try and recover it. The partition table may have just been cleared. I don't know how old versions handled it and how restorable it will be though.
