OK here is the story... My girlfriend and her twin sister cant afford to buy office 07 so her sister asked one of their friend to install a pirated copy on their computer after my gf told her to not do that. Her sister asked him then He came and did it, blue screen came up, was having problems. I was totally not aware of this was happening, or knowing she asked him to come, i have always advised her aganist using pirated copies from somebody else and also recommened to not obtain any at all.

Anyways so he said oh I'll just do a system restore back to factory setting and everything will be fine. Well after the computer rebooted, all data from 4-5 yrs is gone. I went over there yesterday to work on it. Her sister told me that he said that he didnt want to restore it to the last point, just wanted to do factory setting. I'm like ok, never ask anyone unless theyre certified and are a business to work on computers, or just ask me since i have years and years of customizing computers, fixing them for friends.

Anyways, this is my first of a system restore gone bad fix issue. As i am looking at it, it has 250 gb harddrive, only 84 gb is free. so obviously its all there still under something. I cant find it. I ran active uneraser, and diskinternal uneraser. they cant find it. so I brought it home, going to take hdd out and hook it up to my computer as slave and work on it. Any suggestions? I have read a few things online and seems like its pretty much most recoverable. Just hope it is on this one too. I havent got time to do full research on this yet, been busy.

It would depends on how this "system restore" worked and how the drive is partitioned.
You will have more luck if it does not format the drive first, but a factory reset, in this case, says to me "create a clean file system first".
I take it this is XP and they had all their data on 'C:\Docs\Sister\My Documents'?
Semi-related: Would Open Office  work instead of MS Office?





BTW: People will be along shortly to lecture your sister, via you, about backups, even though that is not why you asked.





Off-topic: If sister or sister's friend is sleeping with this 'guy friend', I'd suggest they reconsider.





Edit: This is 'GF with a twin sister', not a 'your sister and her friend'... I get those mixed up. Pity you're not a team member, then you could post here: http://www.ar15.com/forums/topic.html?b=1&f=142&t=922742

 

System Restore using factory cd's creates a second partition that holds the system restore cd and the programs that came with the computer initally, at least on my HP. If he used the factory cd's probably ur fooked. Might could send off to data recovery firm, but it might cost $$$.

I have a office 07 i bought, and i  am putting it on their computer once its fixed. i told them why didnt you ask me first.. They told me theyre not going to let anyone touch it only me. So i have the computer with me and hdd out now. going to put in a new hdd. also i have given them a free 250 gb external backup hdd. Its just really sad that this happened to them, theyre really depressed that all their pictures are possiblity gone forever.

The system restore is saved on the same hdd in a 8gb partition, its a HP pavillion a1130n. Just hope someone can help me out. sending it out to a special place to recover it is my last choice.

that 8gb partition it just hold the re-installer, not a rollback of what was overwritten.





well, a data recovery place will have next to no luck if you write to the drive, of which it is probably already too late.


edit:



what you need to find out is if the system restore moved or renamed GF's profile (assuming she kept everything in the profile folders)

Most of if not all the data is probably gone and unrecoverable. System restore overwrote the old partition where the data was depending on how that was done some of the old data may be recoverable or none will be recoverable. You could send the drive to a data recovery firm but chances are you will not get much if anything back and just waste money.

Two lessons here... don't let idiots near your computer and BACKUP anything you want to keep.

http://www.restorer-ultimate.com/

that one did the work like charm!!! looks like all data is back 119 gb of data. just gotta have both of them look it through and make sure.