Oh where have my babies gone?

Greetings. A first post that was inspired by Asher. I ran into him around two weeks ago at the Disney Hall as he was rounding up a group for a morning shoot (I presume). In response to my query of him, he suggested I join this spot and make a posting about my problem.

Three weeks ago while installing Photoshop CS3 Extended on my new laptop (HP Pavillion dv9000 PC with a Vista operating system), my impatience, coupled with a massive senior moment, succeeded in my inadvertently loosing ALL of my pictures through the recycle bin.

I still have thumbnails of my pictures in my Photoshop Elements 4, but, of course, there are no files behind them. Asher told me if I went to a commercial establishment to have them try retrieval, I'd have to hold off my retirement for a few years to cover the cost.

So mates...any suggestions as to how I should proceed in my quest to return my photos from the darker regions somewhere in my hard drive? I was not able to restore to a date before this calamity as I had blithely proceeded to install Lightroom and other sundry programs, unaware that each addition was going to make it harder to retrieve.

I thank you in advance,

Trent G. Anderson

Hi Trent,

the first thing, is to stop installing new stuff. Generally, the files are marked as 'overwritable'. it just changes a flag or something (used to be the first char in the name). Then, if you write a new file, it may or may not reuse the deleted file area, all or some of it.

This software may recover the files for you. If you have one drive only, then copy it to a dongle, and run it from there. Read the instructions. There are plenty of other systems, but this looks as if it works (I've just downloaded and tried it for you), and even I can afford it ;-)

Best wishes,

Ray

ooops - here's the link http://officerecovery.com/freeundelete/

The most important thing is to not do anything to the drive.

Ray, can PC computers be started in Firewire mode? Macs do that and this allows one to access the drive as just a plain old firewire drive by second Mac. If we can do that, I can recover his files if they are not already destroyed by the Lightroom etc installations.

I'll check to see whether my own data recovery software comes for PC too.

Welcome to OPF!

Asher

Hi Asher,

PC is sort of generic, depends on the mother board manufacturer. I'm not familiar with the hp laptops, but I expect it is at least network able. It is usually easy enough to remove a hdd and put it in a usb case or similar. I do not know if the MAC can read the pc format files - probably ntfs format.

There are plenty of file recovery programs, the one I mentioned is easy to use, and free. (I'm not sure if its for vista.) It just needs to run from a disk other than the one being checked, and to save the file somewhere else, too. A usb memory stick (dongle) will do that for a few dollars.

Best wishes,

Ray

Yes Ray,

Macs can read PC disks. Just wanted to avoid undoing things. I'll do a check on software!

Asher