PC Tech Thread

Recommended data recovery apps?
I appear to have wrecked the partition while moving drives and setting up new NAS.

I think I can recover 99% of the files, but would like to preserve file names and folder structure if possible.

This is the tool I have used with good success in the past https://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

Zero Assumption Recovery has been at the top of my list for many years.

Never failed, except where there is a hardware problem.

Thanks, giving it a go, appears to have found most of the folders with contents! Will have to look.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to like saving the files onto a different network drive file path, so need to buy a USB hard drive with sufficient storage to do it.

Do you know whether it saves the fragments before recombining?

Anyone know where I can get a Corsair hx1200? Miners took all of them

Has anyone got any experience with making a warranty claim with John Lewis? I have decided to get the Oculus Quest 2 and price is the same everywhere but JL offers their signature 2 years warranty, which is very tempting. BUT, if I ever need to make a claim and they are difficult to deal with then I will probably go to Amazon because they are very easy to deal with.

Johnlewis tend to be very consumer friendly (if expensive).

Amazon will only go so far, and then pretty much say fuck you, we don't care.

Definitely choose JL over Amazon unless their price puts you off. Not sure if they do the price matching promise anymore sadly.

Edit: To give you an idea of what they are like, they took a sofa back and gave me a full refund after I had it for 2 years with no questions asked even though I broke it because i'm a big fat fattycakes.

The headset is £299 everywhere even on Amazon, unless I was brave enough to get it from a site nobody has heard of, in which case, it's £20 less... I think I will pay the extra £20.

How did you break a sofa? Lol...

I know someone who claimed for a laptop (im pretty sure they broke it) and JL was fine, and my own experince was buying my parents a dualit kettle which broke 1 week out of warrenty and they said no dice. They replaced it with a JL one and it broke 3 months out of warrenty and JL just replaced it no questions asked.

That being said JL has just ditched the 'never knowingly undersold' tagline so I dont know if they're keeping up with their warrenty.

My experience with Amazon has always been if it's broken, we will give you a full refund and you return the junk to us... I am not sure if a VR headset is something if anyone would bother fixing or not, but I think I will go JL.

I'm a bit of a John Lewis fanboy because my grandma worked there sweeping the floor in the hair salon that used to be on the top floor for 30 years and when she developer dementia they provided an outreach worker free of charge for 4 years and turned up to her funeral. They even own a range of holiday properties and used to take her on short breaks there to provide respite care. They really look after their staff.

That's very considerate of them! Imagine any of our employers doing that? I bet mine wouldn't even send flowers if I ended up in hospital with work related injuries/illnesses.

Shout out to the pc fam for making installing a printer utterly painless and effective after months of apple nightmares. Didn't have to do a thing. Plugged the fucker in, waited 10 seconds, hit print. #Feelsgood

Wait this is how it's supposed to be on Macs, on a PC you are supposed to install drivers, reboot 3 times and eventually reinstall Windows.

Huge thanks for this recommendation, the software worked an absolute treat.

It recovered way more than was actually saved on the drive, including thumbnails, small res jpgs and previously deleted files too. Recovering about 900GB of data, then putting it onto the new NAS drive and then saving a copy onto a backup USB drive too a couple of days though...

I was fully expecting it to be like that.

Zero Assumption Recovery has been at the top of my list for many years.

Good to know, I had a run in with a data recovery company (Fields Data Recovery) last year that I wish I'd researched a bit better in advance. Let's just say I wish I'd seen this site: https://data-recovery-blog.co.uk/ before using them, but it was a recommendation from a friend that I trusted (who said they did good things for them at a fair price).

I was strung along by a few "we're almost there" lines whilst I willingly and knowingly gave them more info as to how important the files might be to me. In the end they quoted a figure I wasn't willing to pay (£645+VAT), and so I rejected that and asked for the HDD back. All in all I only ever paid ~£7 to post the drive to them in the first place, they posted it back to me for free. If they had quoted ~£200 and just did it without the "almost there!" stuff I would have paid.

It was giving proper hardware errors before sending it (which is why I didn't want to make it worse by trying to do the recovery myself) and was not in any better shape by the time it came back.

In the end I found an image of all the files I was looking for on another HDD, so I didn't have to worry about this one.

Zero Assumption Recovery cost $69 as a one off, and it was definitely worth it.
In my case I think my NAS had started to write over the file system so lost the partitions, but ZAR found the previous EXT partitions, and recovered pretty much everything to my knowledge, and preserved 95% of the file names and folders.

A lot of recovery software just recovers the files, but renames them in numerical order, which is no good when you have tens of thousands of mp3s...

no good when you have tens of thousands of mp3s

MP3s are easy to sort if you've done your ID3 tags rigorously 🙂

I don't think my 20 year old self was that organised...

I've used kingdomdatarecovery.co.uk

They weren't able to recover any data (the write head had pretty much physically scrubbed the disc surface) even with a donor drive that was 2 numbers away in the serial number.

They didn't dick me about though - they quoted £400 from the off, and only contacted me to ask if the drive had been previously opened, which would mean they would have to use a dirty clean room.

Once they couldn't do anything, they said so, and said I could have the drives back for £10 p&p, or they could dispose of them for me.

Glad it worked out for you. It's a great bit of software.

And free, if you have the freeware version from loooooong ago.

Wait this is how it's supposed to be on Macs.

Used to be, back when Macs were much more of a niche and Apple felt they could get by with supporting only a limited range of 3rd party hardware. A lot of the "everything just works on a Mac" meme came from the Mac tech universe being much less diverse and Mac users typically only working with other Mac users.

Most home printers have fairly shit drivers for Windows, but they're probably better tested than the shit ones the manufacturer wrote for Mac.

Macs might do better with a proper PostScript printer, since that's what Unixen traditionally support. Unfortunately I don't know that any consumer printers for in that category.