Overwritten

[brindism]

I have a maxtor one-touch external drive. When my computer went down I erased the whole thing and then realized that my maxtor was connected and it got erased too. I lost some really important photos. I have run the trial software on the computer and it says all files are corrupt. When I run it on the Maxtor it says all files have been overwritten. Have I completely lost everything? Is there any way to recover any of it?

[GDH]

Hi,

It would be unlikely that your data has been permanently lost.

Please try this.

1. Download Recover My Files from www.recovermyfiles.com.

2. Install and run the program. When the first wizard windows opens up, close it down so that you can see the main program screen.

3. Click on the OPTIONS button in the main program screen. In the SEARCH tab take the ticks out of "Search for deleted files" so that there are only ticks in "search for lost files".

4. Now click the START SEARCH button and select "Complete File Search". Click next.

5. In the drive selection window, find the "Physical Drive" (your booting drive is physical drive 0, and subsequent drives are numbered 1, 2, 3 etc). Click next.

6. In the File Type selection window, put a tick next to the relevant picture types that you are trying to recover. Now run this search.

What this search will do is to search the entire hard drive and try and find the file types based on the header, content and footer of the files. Click on the files found in the results screen to preview their content in the preview window. Please let me know the results of this search.

[brindism]

It says that all the files are corrupt using the trial version (after 6 hours of searching). I am guessing this means they are gone. I would happily buy the full version if it could get them back but it doesn't look good.