So im supposed to be fixing a laptop for a girl at work. Now i have had no problems in the past getting trojans and worms off of PC’s using simple software and tracking files down. But this time i was out of luck. So my stupid ass does not back up any files (her main concern was pictures). I toss in a windows CD to run the repair console. Well i somehow miss the moment it mentions to hit F2 to go to the repair console and it begins a fully automated install. Quick format blah blah. So my question is, is there ANY way i can get ANY of the files back? Have the drive imaged? Or what? Im at a complete loss and really don’t want to have to tell this girl i lost all of her pictures. i have no problem doing this to one of my computers but it is not a good feeling to lose all of some other person’s data.
Here is an update. The girl ended up telling me that she didn’t really care everything was gone, but she had me hold on to her computer because she had cancelled her internet as she was getting ready to move. So i thought that i might as well read up on some things. So i read up on some disk imaging softwares and what not but didn’t really want to image the entire drive just to get pictures and a few documents back. So i then found a few softwares that find deleted pictures and the such. I ended up buying an adapter so i could hook the 2.5 laptop drive to my desktop and then downloaded the trial software. Started running it before i left for work. After 30 minutes it had picked through less than 20% of the pictures files on the drive but it was definitely finding a lot of the pictures i thought were lost forever. So hopefully when i go home tonight i’ll be able to restore most of the pictures. I’ll post up what the software is when i get home and how well it did at recovering the pictures. So far so good.