recovering files

[Grimmy]

Friend called me this morning, and they some how lost some business files that she needs for her job. I am looking for a good program (freeware if possible) that would recover her files for her.

I have done this ages ago, on a mac (10 years ago maybe) Just wondering what is a good program to use, and maybe a percentage of recovery. She lost a .dll file for one of her programs too.

It's on an old computer, win95 I am sure. Any tips?

[Goober]

There are several pieces of software that can do this. Don't know about free though....Undelete3.0 works on win 95 I think.
The main thing that you need to be aware of is that the software needs to be run from a CD, Floppy...etc. If you try to download or install anything to her hard drive you run the risk of overwriting the deleted file (if that hasn't been done already). There is a file manager called xtree gold that will run in win95 that has an undelete option also.
Sorry I can't be more help.

[Grimmy]

Could it be possible that I download some freeware, and install it on to a CD via burner and have it run off of that?

[Goober]

Originally posted by Grimmy@Dec 16 2003, 05:42 PM
Could it be possible that I download some freeware, and install it on to a CD via burner and have it run off of that?
Yes...that would be the best way to do it.

[Grimmy]

Kewl, thanks. I searched for some progs on cnet and they have some trialware, good for like 30 days, and this will hopefully be the only time that I would have to use it, so then I won't have to spend anything :D

Does win95 have like goback or system restore or anything like that on it?

[JIMINATOR]

it has wishful thinking. depending on the win95 version there may not be fat32.
win95 has pretty much no utilities for anything...
anyway, files will be stored in the old dos format,
where the first letter of the directory entry is changed to indicate deleted,
and the space is freed.
the files may be recoverable if they turned off their system immediately afterward.
doing stuff though, lessens the chance, especially if they have gone
browsing, which will download 100s of files in a regular session.
if they have been using the computer the past couple of days, then set the
expectation that the files are probably not recoverable.
For a realistic recovery effort, you are talking about a recovery cdrom with an
os built in, or pulling the drive and attaching it to another computer to run
recovery software on it. installing software to recover the files is out...

[Grimmy]

Originally posted by JIMINATOR@Dec 16 2003, 05:50 PM
For a realistic recovery effort, you are talking about a recovery cdrom with an
os built in, or pulling the drive and attaching it to another computer to run
recovery software on it. installing software to recover the files is out...
Hey good idea there Jim. I don't know how much she has used her puter since then, but if I can get a hold of her soon, I will see if she can bring over the tower and see what I can do. :thumbs:

[ME BIGGD01]

is it win95, you can just boot into dos and use dos commands to try to undelete. you may also have a seperate file or a copy of the file in 2 places on the win95 system. did they do a search for the dll's missing? also they do know that these system files are hidded an the attribute must be changed. maybe they are there. if you can not get the dll's back, possibly you can reinstall the software over to fix the missing files. shouldnt change the program itself.

i am sure nortons utilities 2003 will let you work of the cd. if you have a copy of that you may want to try that to restore lost files.

[Death Engineer]

.dll files are no sweat. That can normally be fixed by reinstalling the appropriate program. You can even do a search online for some files and just download what you need.

However, if they are missing data files, that's gonna be a tough cookie. Good luck and let us know how it turns out.

DE