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My hard drive was formatted, and installed new windows. I wanted to restore images so I used iCare data recovery software. Some pictures were restored, and some are restored but i can't open them. Is there any free program that can repair broken images? And also is there a better program than iCare, restoring took more then two days for 200GB drive!
Davidenko
Posted 2014-02-07T13:00:43.457
Reputation: 1 279
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First of all if you formatted and reinstalled Windows then there is a good chance you have written over at least a few sectors that contained data you are looking for. Not guaranteed but a really good chance. Once that happens there is nothing that can restore that file.
There is no program that can restore a picture that won't open or is missing data because it has been over written. There is no program that can recover data that has been written over period. Your pictures are likely corrupt and won't open because this is what happened.
You have to understand that when your data is written to the drive it can be written in many different places on the platter, not necessarily all in one nice spot. (Hence the need for fragmenting which rearranges and consolidates the fragments)
The first thing to do when accidentally formatting a drive is stop there. At this point it is true that software might help you recover it but you should know the dangers of using it before you attempt. There is a good post about that here.
There are plenty of good data recovery companies our there like KrollOntrack and DriveSavers. Problem is they are mostly really expensive, so an smaller company that is just as good at recovering data with the same tools like SERT Data Recovery might be a more reasonably priced option to go with if your data is actually important to you.
BillyData
Posted 2014-02-07T13:00:43.457
Reputation: 61
Tnx, I restored some files with iCare Data Recovery, but very few pictures that could open... that's why I was asking about program that can restore pictures. – Davidenko – 2014-02-11T06:10:57.540
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I have successfully used Photorec in the past.
It's been written by Christophe Grenier (CGSecurity) who also wrote TestDisk.
With Testdisk you can recover lost/formatted partitions and repair/restore their MFTs (master file tables) and partition-tables.
Another great tool with a decent GUI is DMDE (DM Disk Editor and Data Recovery Software). It provides similar features and can also be used to recover RAID volumes.
If you're looking for a way to recover lost TrueCrypt partitions - TestCrypt might be able to help.
Data recovery is slow in general and performance will vary based on the read-speed, disk-size, ...
Nicolai Fröhlich
Posted 2014-02-07T13:00:43.457
Reputation: 239
If the pictures cannot be open they likely were fragmented. This means, simply stated, the file isn't actually complete. – Ramhound – 2014-02-07T15:00:47.680