I have a 2006 Vaio laptop. Recently, it started acting up, so we decided to do the Vaio recovery wizard to restore the system. Unfortunately, we forgot about the huge cache of pictures we had on there. Since we remembered this, we have turned it on only twice. Any suggestions as to a software or service we can use to recover the files? I've tried EasyRecovery Professional 6, as we have access to a full version of it, but the only thing that worked is the RAW recovery, taking almost 3 hours and producing over 12 gigs of pictures (though we only had about 4 gigs of pictures, the rest are MPEGs and MOVs that have become decompressed into a ton of pictures. I've tried sifting through them, but a lot are incomplete extractions. A picture would appear in the preview, but when you tried to open it, it would be corrupt. SO, any software or services (within a reasonable price range) that does data recovery and digital photo recovery? Just a bit too reto

One of the best apps I have seen and used is Find and Mount which you can find here: http://findandmount.com/ The free version has only one limitation: a recovery speed of 512KB/sec - fast enough for JPEGSs, MP3s, Docs. If you have a lot to recover start it and let it run over night or however long. It works very well. In the meantime, do not be writing anything to your HDD as you may overwrite needed files. Monk

This looks like a winner...its finding stuff I couldn't find before on my good computer. I wonder what it'll find on the bad one. Thanks for the info. And do you know what could recover from disk images? I have one or 2 camera cards backed up as .img files, but this program couldn't find any partitions on them, therefore not getting any pictures... EDIT: it seems that its finding nothing. is this more for damaged partitions? I'm currently letting it run the full scan. (but still, thanks for this!) Just a bit too reto

It's only an assumption but I would imagine the app would find the *.img file - which you could recover and then, once recovered, you would simply restore the file using whatever app that created it. Find and Mount is great, eh? I keep a shortcut for it on my DT so as not to forget I have it. Used it on several occasions after deleting files or reformatting partitions. Monk

It was good at one thing...finding a few permanently hidden folders on my HDD. It did NOT, however, find the lost files. I'm needing something to recover deleted pictures, not necessarily bad partitions. Just a bit too reto

I've used file scavenger http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm and it works better than any others I tried. Download the demo version and search for *.jpg and see what you come up with. It will give the actual names of all the files. It DOES work for retreiving pictures as I used it to recover 5 yrs of photos after a lady had Dell advise her to reformat and didn't tell her to save her pics beforehand. When I bought it 2 yrs ago it was just $39.95, now I see it is $49.00 Some HELP in posting on Computing.net plus free progs and instructions Cheers

hi a freeware version ive used with a moderate amount of luck is recuva, though you will need the portable version on a memory stick as not to over write anything currently on the hard drive. http://www.recuva.com/download/builds