My girlfriend's Acer laptop crashed and she lost a lot of data, as the local repairman she took it to said he had to reformat it.

Can anyone recommend a REALLY good and well-experienced repair person in Bangkok, just in case it is not too late for data recovery ?

She said that she had saved the data in drive "D", but the repairman checked there after reformatting "C", and found nothing.

I want to find someone really competent, just in case the repairman was not. Any recommendations, folks ?

I'd prefer a Western person so I can chat to them, and because so much computer information is in English. Not essential though.

Edited November 27, 200916 yr by Latindancer

Reformatting any part of the drive was not a good idea if trying to recover data. But anyway:

* Consider buying a copy of Spinrite (they have no questions asked refund if it doesn't work).

* Failing that, take the drive down to Pantip - there are plenty of repair shops there that run various data recovery tools. They successfully recovered my boss's drive earlier this year. Wasn't too expensive but took a few days.

Edited November 27, 200916 yr by Crushdepth

Thanks, Crushdepth ! I'll go to Pantip.....I had thought they only sold new computers....

you could download RECUVA which is free from recuva.com. I have found it to be excellent.

Don't save any data in the location of data you want to recover. If the drive has simply been formated the data is still there, but if you place new data in the same location then the old data is gone forever. Best not to use the laptop until the old data is recovered...

So I should download RECUVA to a usb stick and then run it ? ( If I can figure out how....haha)

So I should download RECUVA to a usb stick and then run it ? ( If I can figure out how....haha)

If I understand you correctly, the C drive is now OK but there might be lost information on the D drive. If so you can just download to the C drive. It really is quite simple to use and safe.

Despite my relative lack of computer skills, I downloaded a data recovery program from Majorgeeks ( great website ! ), and recovered all her photos from D drive. I then downloaded them to C drive. It could only find a couple of documents. I wonder why ?

I tried 3 other programs ( one of which was Recuva ) before I tried this one.......Discdigger. It's freeware, and I recommend it...

I might try another one or two before I give up on the documents. They were either Excel, or Powerpoint presentations.

Any suggestions, folks ?

Despite my relative lack of computer skills, I downloaded a data recovery program from Majorgeeks ( great website ! ), and recovered all her photos from D drive. I then downloaded them to C drive. It could only find a couple of documents. I wonder why ?

I tried 3 other programs ( one of which was Recuva ) before I tried this one.......Discdigger. It's freeware, and I recommend it...

I might try another one or two before I give up on the documents. They were either Excel, or Powerpoint presentations.

Any suggestions, folks ?

You seem to be doing very well on your own initiative! The only thought that occurs to me is does Discdigger (I haven't tried it) ask you to specify which type of program to look for? ie you might have to tell it to look for Excel files.

Search for "Recover my files." You will need to find the crack/hack for it but I've used it and it's good. A reason why you couldn't recover the files is that they might have been corrupted. Good luck.

If it's a laptop, if she had a D: drive, it was almost certainly simply a separate partition on the single hard drive.

If the "technician" basically reformatted the entire drive as a single C: drive, probably part of what was there has been overwritten with the Operating system and anything else he installed, and any files you've recovered to the C: drive may also be doing the same. - Or did he leave the D: partition, but it simply can't be mounted properly.

(For full data recovery after a hard disk failure, ideally you would have replaced the original hard disk with a new one and put the old one in an external enclosure. That means that you can treat the old drive as read-only until you've got any recoverable data off it.)

Why not give the Ultimate Boot CD a try, it has lots of HDD analysis and repair tools.