[clug] OT: Windows hard drive recovery suggestions

[Ian Matters]

Good morning CLUGgers.

Following all of the helpful responses to my question to this list about recovering maliciously deleted files from a Windows computer and external drive I would like to report my progress so far.

I am yet to look at the Dell laptop in question but attempting to recover files from an external USB-connected hard drive was very successful it seems. The short story is that using PhotoRec [1] running on one of my Debian machines I managed to recover over 500GB of files in 88 subdirectories. The recovered files were temporarily stored on a 2TB ext4 volume and were later transferred back to the Windows environment.

Admittedly there was lots of detritus recovered but there were also lots of JPEG happy snaps as well as wordprocessing and spreadsheet files that appear to be of significant value.

So once again, thank you for your collective wisdom and shared ideas.

[1] https://www.cgsecurity.org

Cheers, Ian Matters
---
On 23/05/18 11:09, Ian Matters via linux wrote:
> Good morning all.
> 
> An American friend of mine living here in Canberra was yesterday scammed by one of those “Telstra"  phone calls from South Asia. My friend is quite unwell. The end result of the scam is that he has had most of his important data files deleted from the hard drive on his Dell + Windows laptop and the external hard drive that was connected to at the time. I have suggested that he stop using
> his computer until such time that he can take both the computer and the external hard drive to a data recovery specialist.
> 
> My question to this group is for suggestions for the names of data recovery specialists that he could approach in order to recover as many files as possible. Any suggestions?
> 
> Cheers, Ian Matters
> ---