Even data recovery software installation could spoil your sensitive data. If the data is really important to you, and you do not have another logical drive to install software to, take whole hard drive out of the computer and plug into another computer where data recovery software has been already installed.
DO NOT SAVE THE DATA ON THE SAME LOGICAL DRIVE YOU ARE RECOVERING FROM!If you save recovered data onto the same drive where the deleted data was located, you can corrupt the data you are trying to recover. If this happens no software will be able to recover it. It's essential to save the data onto another logical, removable, network or floppy drive.
CREATE A DISK IMAGE IF YOU HAVE AN EXTRA HARD DRIVE, OR OTHER LOGICAL DRIVES HAVE ENOUGH FREE SPACE TO CONTAIN THE IMAGE!Disk Image is a mirror of your logical drive that is stored in one file. This can be useful when you want to backup the contents of the whole drive, and restore it or work with it later. Before you start recovering the deleted files, it may be a good idea to create a Disk Image for this drive, if you have enough space on another drive. Why? Because if you do something wrong while recovering the files (for example, recovering them onto the same drive could destroy their contents), you still will be able to recover these deleted files and folders from the Disk Image that you have wisely created.
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