Recovering Lost Files
 

Recently in the wonderful adventures of work some guys wiped a guys pc before checking the back up cd for the pc. We used ntrestore to recover lost files (yes it's windows, sadly) but alot of the data is unreadable. For example the xls files can be opened but they open with the squares and other stuff. Any one know a better utility to recover with or a program that would be able to read this?

im afraid its too late now but what i would suggest for the future is when ever you realise that youve wiped a hard disk partition put the disk in a unix box and use dd to get a working copy of the destructed data and restore from that, then you can have as many tries with as many different programs as you like.

sorry this wasnt more helpful but hopefully next time you do this you'll not work off the original. the restoring program/technique you use greatly depends on how the data was deleted.