Morris Minor Owners Club

Helppppppp this is not a car related topic at all, I have posted this question on other forums but no one has been able to come up with a solution yet. Over a week ago my son-inlaw was transfering vidio pictures of the children from a vidio camera onto a dvd hard drive recorder ( the type that is used with a tv to record tv progs not one that is used in a pc). he successfuly transfered them onto the recorder, put in a blank disc pressed reformat (meaning to reformat the blank disc, but in stead of the disc being reformatted he reformatted the hard drive and lost the lot!!.now he has no of the first 3 years of their life. not even a copy on the camera. is all lost or can they be retrieved.

Dont record anything else on it - thats the next worse thing you could do. On a PC you could use a command called 'unformat'
You might have to take the hard drive out and connect it to computer to continue with the 'unformat' or there are companies around that can recover data - try yellow pages/google etc.
But most important - dont record anything else

Unfortunately unformat went out with DOS 6.22.
He will need to take the drive out and either connect it to a PC and run some recovery software on it or take it to be recovered.
Phone round a few places to get an idea of the cost. Usually it will be based on the size of the drive.
In effect all the format does is blank the address book (or contents page).
The data is still there but can't easily be found.
You may have success doing it yourself a data recovery company will have no problem at all.

What media does the video camera record to and how did he wipe it? Maybe that would be easier to recover than the hard disk in the DVD recorder.

I always keep the original tapes of any recordings i make just in case. I used to record these on to VHS tapes, but now use a hard drive recorder - didn't know this could be inadvertantly wiped. You must be pretty gutted, but I'm sure you'll be able to get the lost data back.

Pete

You are going to need to get a copy of UBCD (ultimate boot cd) ... luckily it is a free, open-source tool

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

You are also going to need to do a LOT of reading of documentation ... luckily however I should imagine that you will be able to recover from this mishap ... as other people have mentioned ... do not attempt to use the dvd recorder in any way, you should pull the HDD out of it and attach it to a computer then boot from the UBCD.

Only attempt recovery AFTER you have read, and re-read the documentation.

If you cant make head/tail of the docs, then you are going to need to contact a data-recovery specialist ... these guys will be expensive, but hey what's that compared to the value of those vids? ... ideally if you are going to contact a third party to recover the data, they would generally prefer it if you havent had a go yourself first, since if you dont know what you are doing you may make matters worse (and more expensive)

Active@ Partition Recovery on the UBCD looks like it should do the job but not the demo version.http://www.ubcd4win.com/
Is worth a look too.
It has a couple of freeware tools that should also work.
Handy Recovery™ and FreeUndelete both look useful.
Don't be surprised if the videos aren't saved as files that windows will recognise as being video format.
Dvd hard drive recorders may have there own formats for saving files.
Good luck with it

The more I think about it the more I'd be inclined to pay someone else to do it for you ... I personally would feel fairly dodgy about doing it for myself, and I'm a coder and have been messing about with computers since the late seventies

As the value is sentimental I agree with alainmoran.
Be prepared for quite a nasty bill though.http://www.easyrecovery.co.uk/Price_List.htm
say half price is £287.49!

It can be done yourself. I do it as part of my job occasionally. But unless you have built a PC and are happy changing BIOS settings recovering irreplaceable data is no waty to start learning

There is a school of thought that says data doesn't exist unless it is backed up in 2 or 3 places.

Hard drives (and pen drives) DO FAIL so make backups.

Also treat the drive like an egg. If you drop it, it will break. If you have to post it pack it very well.

There are a few decent free programs about:
DriveRescue, HandyRecovery, Restoration, Findntfs etc.
As previously stated - drive out and plug into pc,and don't load any of these data recovery programs onto the drive from the hard disk recorder. Use the pc hard disk to load these programs.

iddy

I've used programmes before that let me recover photos I've accidentally deleted - they do work but are a pain in the neck to use. Might find the stuff though!

What a shame

they have decided to send the recorder off and have the vidios and pics restored professionally. The IT chap in the hospital where they workadvised against trying to do it them selves.