computer whizzes

[king kong bong]

i had this skate demo on my old pc and it got rebooted. is there anyway i can retreive the file?

[cannabis campbell]

I dont think so you should of backed it up.

did you lose evreything else you had aswell, and how long ago was it

[lateralus]

Rebooted? Do you mean formatted? If the file was just deleted, then, depending on the filesystem your operating system resides on, you might be able to find a program which can retrieve the file. I think that years ago, before Windows got popular, DOS shipped with a program called 'undelete'.

In any case, I don't use Windows anyway. Linux, babay.

[king kong bong]

it was awhile ago and i reformatted it a few times but i heard when you erase something it never really gets fully deleted and remains somewhere on your hard drive.

[cannabis campbell]

Yeah there is a way i think but its really complicated

[lateralus]

it was awhile ago and i reformatted it a few times but i heard when you erase something it never really gets fully deleted and remains somewhere on your hard drive.That's true, but I wonder how in the hell that is possible. It depends on the filesystem (you're probably using NTFS or FAT32). Google it, I'm positive you can determine whether or not you can do it, and if you can, you can download some shareware program to pull it off.

[bedake]

Im pretty sure its gone man, if you reformated it

[king kong bong]

damn it that demo was classic.

[lateralus]

It's kind of scary. It's a safe bet some organizations in authority already have extremely powerful and intelligent harddrive forensic software. Just another reason to be paranoid every time you feed your habit of downloading from bittorrent and burning CDs/DVDs. :eek:

[benagain]

It all depends on if the chunk of hard disk space that was holding that data has been wrote over. When you delete something it flags it as deleted so when you check my computer you see you have X ammount of disk space left (even though the data is still there). It'll stay there till you save something in that space. Once you do, it's gone for good. A good bud of mine did data recovery for the cops at one point till he went military. I'll see if I still have any of his apps laying around

[king kong bong]

cool good lookin out.

[Big Calhoun]

Since you reformatted the computer, you're going to need a heavy duty app to recover that data. More than likely, reformatting also overwrote your FAT table, this is where your OS keeps track of where files are/were. If that is overwritten, then a typical undelete app has no 'starting point' to recover the information. You'll need something a little more heavy duty that'll be able to analyze the raw contents of the file.

Get a CD burner and always back things up!!

[king kong bong]

damn viruses.

[lateralus]

When you delete something it flags it as deleted so when you check my computer you see you have X ammount of disk space left (even though the data is still there). It'll stay there till you save something in that space. Once you do, it's gone for good.Ah. See, I knew about how data just lies around still there, but I thought somehow it could be recovered even after having been written over, and I was wondering how the hell that's possible. :rolleyes:
Since you reformatted the computer, you're going to need a heavy duty app to recover that data. More than likely, reformatting also overwrote your FAT table, this is where your OS keeps track of where files are/were. If that is overwritten, then a typical undelete app has no 'starting point' to recover the information. You'll need something a little more heavy duty that'll be able to analyze the raw contents of the file.

Get a CD burner and always back things up!!Yeah, but that's only for FAT filesystems, right? For example, I use ReiserFS which uses a completely different algorithm to keep track of all the files/directories.