[paulthomasno6]

A few months ago I reformatted my hard disk. There were some files that I lost which I assumed were gone forever, but reading lately I learn that they are most likely still on the disk. Can anyone recommend a program which will
a) show me the files that are hidden in this manner and b) make them accessible?

[jephree]

When you do a quick format you generally open the drive to be re-written. The old data is not removed per se but will begin to be over-written as you reload new data. The more you use the hard drive in question the deeper the old data will be buried and the harder any recovery.

It might have been an easy recovery the day after you formatted. Now it depends on what you have done and what you want to spend.

The usual process is to insert the drive as a slave in another computer and then load the Recovery software on the working Master hard drive in order to try and recover data from the slave.

There are some free programs but they tend to be basic. Some programs offer free data detection but you need to purchase for recovery.

Anyway here are two googles:

http://www.google.com/search?q=data+...e=utf8&oe=utf8

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...y+&btnG=Search


.

[paulthomasno6]

Thanks. If I find out what's still available - and none of it was vital, thankfully - I can decide then whether it's time to spend dough.

[paulthomasno6]

Supplementary question: if I do unearth any files that are partially overwritten, I'd rather delete them than leave them taking up space. Is this a major operation?

[jephree]

From my amateur understanding these files are not taking any space as they are not reported to the Operating System. The Zeros and Ones are still Zeros and Ones but not in any form that the Operating System recognizes and therefore they are not taking up space.

What mega data wipe programs do is write Zeros to the disk over and over and over again. But outside of a specific framework the Zeros and Ones are not physically spatial.

This also relates to the notion that any data ever written to a hard drive can be recovered at some level with the proper tools.

To Delete basically just means the data has been removed from direct detection of the Operating System and the disk space is freed up for the future. But until you overwrite the entire hard drive multiple times the series of Zeros and Ones will probably be somewhere.

Again this is purely my amateur perspective here.

[paulthomasno6]

I feel another question coming on after that jeph but I'm not sure what it is yet!

[paulthomasno6]

Okay, I think I might have that new question.
It's about the difference between 'overwriting' a disk and erasing it. In your last post you say '...until you overwrite the entire hard drive multiple times...'; isn't erasing a disk essentially the same as overwriting it? I thought that a disk could only be filled up once and then it was kaput. Likewise for an erased disk, you can't reuse it afterward.
I seem to be wandering off my original question here. Look out, I'm on a roll!

[jephree]

Erasing and over-writing are the same. I suppose the faulty term is erasing as the disk is just set to be over-written. There is really no deleting nor erasing just over-writing.

A mechanically functional hard drive is endlessly re-usable. It can be over-written as often as you like. At the same time it can also hold traces of all previous data ever stored on it. To technically explain this I cannot.

Here are some links that hold some other details and more professional ideas:

http://www.google.com/search?q=erasi...e=utf8&oe=utf8

[paulthomasno6]

Some reading for the weekend - thanks, jephree.

[paulthomasno6]

Back again!
Poking around in the darker corners of my system I have discovered that my hard disk has 3 sectors, the C, (also labelled the ACER sector), the D and the *. C has all the programs, files, etc as far as I can tell, and the D is space for backup. So what's in the *? Twinkle, twinkle, little *, how I wonder... Okay, enough of that.