Formatted Disk Recovery
May 28th, 2020
Thanks in advace!
Have you tried Recuva?
I’m actually looking for a software specifically to recover my bookmarks. Do you say that Recuva is capable?
Try “Get Data Back For NTFS & FAT”
Spindrive but cannot get it to recover the data after scanning the disk
That’s hardly surprising, It’s not meant for data recovery, It’s meant for remapping bad sectors!
and alos ontrack easy recovery failed to recover the data
You sure you even know what your looking for?
To recover your FF bookmarks, You would have to recover the complete previous FF profile.
It’s usually located in the mozilla\firefox on the appdata folder.
I'm looking for a miracle right here?
If you have mishandled the situation, Absolutely!
Let me fill you in on the data recovery basics:
1. A format may or may not be recoverable, It depends how exactly it was done.
A quick/full format done from a 3rd party partitioning tool or XP is recoverable. A quick format done from Vista/Win7/Win8 is recoverable too (But not a full one, Since Vista, M$ has changed it so that if you do a full format it overwrites all sectors of the selected partition!) 2. Data is only recoverable til overwritten, Once overwritten, It’s gone forever!
But it depends on the position too. For example, Let’s say you had 20GB of space
in use when you decided to create XYZ folder and put certain data in it and then
you reformatted and reinstalled the OS on that same partition, Provided you haven’t
yet reached that threshold (20GB+ space in use) then that would mean that particular
data hasn’t been overwritten yet, Making it effectively recoverable!
3. From reasons already specified, You should never, ever save recovered data to the same
partition it was deleted from! (Will render it useless and irrecoverable!) Since the OS partition was involved, It’s highly recommended that you STOP using the
computer til the data is recovered (if it’s even an option) as any temp file can further reduce your chances of a successful recovery! I suggest you give the bootable version of data recovery wizard a try:
http://home.comcast.net/~rotten245/trial/fo-r580.zip
Download/Install/Create boot cd from another computer!
Edit: Just a couple more things I’d like to add:
1. Backup is too underrated. Most people fail to realize how important it is til
a disaster happens. I hope you learned your lesson from this experience.
2. Having an OS problem is never an excuse to self-induced data loss.
You can still backup your data even if your OS fails to start, Always remember that!
There are various Linux/WinPE live cds which can used for this task. Not entirely
sure whether this was the case or you remembered too late, But it’s useful information nonetheless.
1st get “Recuva” and see what it finds with a quick search
this is what you are looking for if you have FF13 or later (I think)
C:\Users\<your user name>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<misc #>.default\bookmarkbackups\bookmarks-2013-03-11.json
the file name is like this – bookmarks-2013-03-11.json – except for the date (2013-03-11) part
looking for a software specifically to recover my bookmarks
don’t know of any myself
bookmarks are a file, so any file recovery app should work
some are better than others so try “Recuva”
this is what you are looking for if you have FF13 or later (I think)
It’ll do, But it’s not good enough if you ask me.
Those automatic bookmark backups only include the bookmarks themselves (without the icons)
The icons are stored on another file, So it’d be better to recover the entire profile instead.
unfortunately none worked for me. I guess that partition is overwritten so many programs could see new firefox profile created after the recovery but not the old one.
Anyway, thanks for your efforts and invaluable suggestions.