Question : Problem: Data Recovery after Deployment of Ghost Image

Hello, everyone.

I've lost a significant amount of a user's data, and I would like to ask if there is some means of getting it back. What happened is this: attempting to re-image a user's laptop computer (a Dell D610), using Symantec Ghost 8, I accidentally deployed the disk image onto the user's external hard drive (a Maxtor One Touch 4), which he was using as a backup. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that this is what I'd done before I had also deployed the image onto the hard drive of this user's laptop (the drive that had been using the external hard drive mentioned above as its backup).

The laptop hard drive is 55 GB in size, and the external hard drive is 160 GB. The ghost image deployed onto both was roughly 6 GB in size. I don't know how much space was being taken up by the user's data pre-deployment, unfortunately, but I can say that the data he's missing consists of digital photos, AutoCAD drawings, Microsoft Word files and Microsoft Excel files.

I have already tried most of the free options I could locate, including PC Inspector, Restoration, and TestDisk. The PhotoRec program that comes bundled along with TestDisk recovered a number of files, but most of them are corrupted or otherwise inaccessible.

So, the question is: Is there any way short of sending the drive off to an extremely high-dollar data recovery service that I might go about trying to recover my user's data (apart, of course, from those I mention in the previous paragraph)?

Many thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

MR

Answer : Problem: Data Recovery after Deployment of Ghost Image

First of all you would have to make sure the disks you want to recover data from aren't in use, as windows writes to disks and that reduces the chances of recovering data.

Install getdataback to a windows PC and connect the disk as a 2nd HD to that PC and let the tool scan the disk. It'll show you what files and folders are recoverable. If you are then satisfied that it is worth recovering that data, register the utility so you can copy the data from the Disk.

http://runtime.org