Recover Lost Files

incognito

New Member
Hey people,

I had a question about recovering (possibly) lost files. My computer crashed a couple weeks ago and I had to reformat the hard drive and do a clean install of windows 7.

Fortunately I backed up my user profile on an external hard drive before that happened. Unfortunately when I do a windows restore it only restores about half of the music, movie and document folders. The external drive shows that it has 130GB of data on it but only restores about 50GB.

I searched for some of the missing files on the external and it can't find them. I'm assuming that since the drive is showing an extra 80GB of data that it's not lost forever it's just not being accessed in the windows restore.

Is there any way to manually copy these files? Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks
 
If you are trying to access files on an external drive after reinstalling windows, you most likely will have to take ownership of the drive/folders before you will have access to them.
 
If you are trying to access files on an external drive after reinstalling windows, you most likely will have to take ownership of the drive/folders before you will have access to them.

Thanks for the tip. I think that might be the problem. I tried changing the permissions and got the dialogue window telling me that the security settings were being updated. Unfortunately, I got two error messages telling me access was denied for the system volume

Is there anyway to get around this? I googled this problem and some people suggested changing permissions to inheritable but I got the same two error messages.
 
I tried a program called unlocker and that was a bust. All I got was a bunch of free toolbars and a program that didn't load, and probably a keylogger in the background somewhere ;P
 
Are you trying to take ownership correctly? What operating system are you running?
 
Are you trying to take ownership correctly? What operating system are you running?

Windows 7 64bit

External HDD-
Seagate Freeagent GoFlex Drive

There are three files on the HDD. The restore file with 62GB of data, a folder called WindowsImageBackup with 130GB of data and a third file called mediaID.bin with a few kb of data. Total on the HDD is about 196GB and when I run restore it seems to copy about 62GB of data onto C drive. I assumed that the folder WindowsImageBackup was accessed as part of the Windows Restore but would that be something entirely separate?

I can go in and take ownership of all three folders and subfolders no problem but I get the access denied error if I try to take ownership of the whole drive. The system volume files that I can't access aren't showing in any of these three folders.

I pretty much followed these steps off the windows forums except I right click on drive E and try to take ownership of the whole drive.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753659.aspx

1.Open Windows Explorer, and then locate the file or folder you want to take ownership of.

2.Right-click the file or folder, click Properties, and then click the Security tab.

3.Click Advanced, and then click the Owner tab.

4.Click Edit, and then do one of the following:

To change the owner to a user or group that is not listed, click Other users and groups and, in Enter the object name to select (examples), type the name of the user or group, and then click OK.

To change the owner to a user or group that is listed, in the Change owner to box, click the new owner.

5.(Optional) To change the owner of all subcontainers and objects within the tree, select the Replace owner on subcontainers and objects check box.
 
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If you used a special program to create a backup image then you would need to use that program again to restore the data. You won't be able to access the data without that program. I thought we were talking about regular personal files.
 
If you used a special program to create a backup image then you would need to use that program again to restore the data. You won't be able to access the data without that program. I thought we were talking about regular personal files.

Nope didn't use third party software. I used the windows backup/restore which I'm assuming creates a system image.

When I use the restore application it only restores about half of the personal files, that approx. 60GB I mentioned when it should restore 130GB of data. When I search for some of the missing music files within that restore they don't even show up. But the fact that when I click on the properties of the WindowsImageBackup folder it stills show 130GB of data is still there leads me to believe that its not completely lost, just not being accessed.

Since I can't take ownership of the whole drive maybe some files became locked and won't restore properly?
 
I'm not sure if you can access backup image without going through the windows backup program? I'm not familiar with the program itself, sorry. The restore image could be corrupt I guess if it won't restore the whole thing.
 
Use Kernel for Windows Data Recovery software and recover deleted or lost files, folders from Windows partitions (FAT & NTFS). It doesn’t matter whether you have deleted the required data from Recycle Bin by using Shift+Delete keys, with this software it is easily possible to recover the data in all situation. The best aspect about this tool is it allows you to recover data also from deleted or corrupt partitions of Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, XP, 2000, 2003, Windows Vista.
 
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