I'm trying to recover deleted data for a friend.
They accidentally formatted their hard drive (I'm hoping it was just a quick format).
The drive is currently in an external case accessed by USB. When I targeted the drive using CCleaner's Recuva tool it failed saying it was Unable to Determine File System Type
So I'm trying out Hiren's BootCD PE
I got my computer to boot from the USB, and tried a few of the different backup programs.
At long last I created a backup file using DriveImage XML
The backup file is of the datatype .mrimg.
This backup was created using the setting that allows for data recovery.
I see when I right click on it I can attempt to mount it as a drive.
That seems to succeed, but the drive does not show up in the my PC view, so perhaps mounting is failing silently?
At the moment I am attempting to use Recuva targeting the folder containing the .mrimg. It has a progress bar, and I guess I will know if a few hours if that works, but I have doubts that this is how I'm intended to use the backup file.
I would rather not touch the hard drive again, in case I utterly fail at this, I hope to do no harm, and let professionals have a shot at it. I have 2 copies of the backup on my machines hard drive in case I mess one up.
So I'm looking for a way to recover the lost files just from this .mrimg backup that was made using DriveImage XML.
I'm suspecting that the way I'm currently trying to use Recuva is not going to work, but if it does, I'll let you know.
Edit: Replying to comments:
@music2myear: I was able to get the image to mount as a drive... However despite the image being 500GB, the mounted drive is only about 50MB.
So I suspect the image creation failed.
@DrMoishe Pippik: I did choose an image type that said it was for forensic, but it wasn't the clone option that completely overwrites another drive. (I don't have an empty drive to clone this too, but I do have drive I'm currently using that also have more than 500GB of free space to hold the image.)
Since the image is garbage, I think I'm done attempting to recover data.
Those links are great though! If I were brave enough to try again, I suspect I would find everything I need there. Thanks!
(since there was no answer posted, I cannot accept an answer... should I delete this question, or summarize something and mark that as an answer?)
