my mom bought a computer from best buy, and got the warrenty through them
the ram failed, I took it in for her. they said that they would call if they had to wipe the harddrive. I asked if I could remove the harddrive, they said no.
the harddisk was sata, all my other computers and drives use ide.. so I couldnt back it up and hadnt thought to do so before it failed (brand new computer, only about three months old)
they wiped it without calling.

there's many news stories talking about data being taken off wiped drives, but I cant (quickly) find the software to do so
there was some valuable data on the harddisk and if possible I need to recover it

cost is an issue though

7/8/2006 7:23:43 PM

http://www.dtidata.com/recover_it_all.htm

7/8/2006 8:31:26 PM

Quote :

"wiped drives"

There's a difference between wiped (i.e. DoD wiped) drives and formatted drives. Formatted drives it may be possible to recover the data from. Wiped drives are 99.999% impossible to do so. Find out which Best Buy did.

Quote :

"I asked if I could remove the harddrive, they said no."

You are the customer ... don't let them tell you what you can and can't do.

Quote :

"they said that they would call if they had to wipe the harddrive"

What does this have to do with the RAM failing?

Quote :

"but I cant (quickly) find the software to do so"

Recovering data should never be "quick" and definitely isn't cheap (in terms of time or money) to do it correctly. You can lookup a program called PCI Recovery 4.0 ... but you may well end up losing more data in the process if you don't know what you are doing. Based on your post ... I would not attempt this yourself.

Quote :

"they wiped it without calling [...] there was some valuable data on the harddisk and if possible I need to recover it"

How far are you willing to go on this issue? You can take this up the corporate ladder an DEMAND Best Buy send the hard drive into a data recover center to retreive the files.

Post some more information/updates as you get them, and can probably narrow options down from there.

7/8/2006 8:51:43 PM

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32118

7/8/2006 9:02:36 PM

^^meant formatted, as I'm assuming bestbuy just threw in the recovery cd

on second thought, yes, I should have removed the harddrive.. was in a hurry, as I had still had to pack for a trip. I assumed that bestbuy would honor what was put on paper.. bad assumption

best buy apparently makes the stores send the box in, rather than repair instore. the guy instore diagnosed the machine with a version of memtest.. as I did before I took it in.. failed ofcourse

what I meant by quick was I googled for about ten min before posting.. 'was hoping for a simple piece of software like ^^^ that might do it for me.. anyone used that or something like it before?

I realise that data recovery for a crashed drive can be expensive and hard, but I havnt looked much into recovering data that had been overwritten or lost

I'm going to go into bestbuy tomarrow or monday and talk to them about it, as it was on the release that I signed that they would call before formatting, which ofcourse they didnt

7/8/2006 9:19:42 PM

just google for drive recovery programs, there are TONS out there that you can buy for less than 100 bucks that will do the trick nicely

7/8/2006 9:45:24 PM

I found a nice free data recovery program a while back ago....I know it exists so just spend some time googling.

You can recover a decent amount of data back, but don't count on getting it all back unless you want to spend some $$$

7/8/2006 11:08:33 PM

OnTrack will do it.
Also I think Hirens 8.1 Boot CD has utilities to do this.

7/8/2006 11:43:21 PM

wow, all this for something that should have taken 10 minutes to fix. GG best buy.

7/9/2006 11:12:48 AM