Be Excellent To Each Other

A colleague of mine has a laptop at home that crashed. It told him to stick in the disk he got when he bought it, and needless to say it restored everything to factory settings and deleted everything from the hard drive.

He really wants to get the pics back that were on there, as it includes his wedding photos and all the pics of the first two years since his son was born. He, sadly, has no backups.

What's the likelihood he can restore these pics? And how much should it cost him to do so? I think it's a Samsung laptop on Windows 7 or similar. He's not done anything with it since he realised what had happened.

Should he seek help from expensive data recovery services, is there a better way. He's been quoted 700 quid to get them back by one firm. That seems terribly high!

Any knowledge of this in the Beex Hive Mind?

Run photorec on it. Won't make it any worse at least.

First thing would be to ensure that he doesn't use the drive for anything.
If he wants to try to recover himself, then he needs to remove the drive from the laptop and plug it in as a secondary drive in another machine (that is running the same OS, so that it doesn't do any further damage by initialising the disk in any way) and choose a photo recovery application.

A quick google shows this review page
http://photo-recovery-software-review.t ... views.com/
Which is US based, but I assume the software is available for download. I've used EaseUS in the past, but this was a long time ago, so no idea what is deemed a good bit of recovery software these days.

One extra step I recommend doing is before he runs anything against the disk, he takes a cloned image of it, and runs against that instead. Keeps the original disk in its current state so that is none of the software works for him, he still has the option of sending it off to an expert without any further damage to the data.

If the cost is an issue and he isn't confident in doing all this himself, then I have a Windows 7 machine and a disk caddy and can give it a go for him if he likes. I think I still have EaseUS installed somewhere and everything is basically just a click and wait operation. The prices the commercial guys charge are ludicrous in my opinion

I'd recommend using a bootable CD / DVD with recovery software on it, before removing the drive and putting it in a caddy - that has its own risks.
Again, I found a bootable linux image with phototrec and other tools on it that worked a treat for this in the past.

edit: try this maybe - it's not the one I used but it looks OK http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Good point actually, he'll still need somewhere to put the recovered files onto though, so will need another disk plugged in somehow, I assume the bootable linux image will be able to access a disk attached by USB? I've never done this on a laptop with a drive in situ before, i've always had the luxury of disk caddies and extra sata ports to plug stuff into, as i'm a PC hoarder

Yep, copy to 8GB memory stick or whatever you have kicking about

Maybe I'm being paranoid but I know someone who, faced with this problem, took the drive out to put it in a caddy and promptly dropped it on the floor, irreversably knackering it.

Shouldn't laugh but

I paid some chinese people about $500 to fix my laptop, recover all my photos and slap in a new harddrive. Data recovery is horrendously expensive if you go somewhere.

I hope to fuck you changed all your passwords afterwards! Also WTF?

It's ok. They were aussie dollars

AKA nom pms

Stuff is horrendously expensive here.

Yeah, but you paid someone to obtain data from your laptop. I bet the took all that they could.