Ask HN: Best software to recover deleted files from old drives?

1 pointbrightball1 comment

I found my old laptop from college in the attic (Windows 2000) and wanted to run a recovery tool on it to see what I can find. The software I see when searching all looks very...questionable. Does anybody have a good recommendation? Ideally something that I could run from my Linux machine now but I’m open best recommendations for Windows.

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testdisk and CloneZilla. Also checkout the „UltimateBootCD“

I would recommend to do a clone using CloneZilla. Then you only stress the old drive once. Then make a backup of the clone. Finally load the clone as part of a secondary disk inside a Virtual Machine (like VirtualBox) and from there recover the data, restore partitions (with testdisk) and extract the data to your host system.

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