How to recover data after a virus?

[sonjeriff]

My labtop was infected by a trojan virus i was not able to restore from an earlier setting. I did get rid of the virus and reinstalled windows vista but now i want to recover my word documents and pictures and other programs but i do not know how. How can i recover all my data?

 

[patonb]

Well its not going to be easy. You should have done it before using a livecd of ubuntu or used it as a usb connected drive.

Now youre going to need to find a file recovery program and try and hope it'll find your files.

I don't know of any good ones, but there are both free and paid ones that work.

And the more you use the computer to save files, even temporary internet filres, the worse off you'll be, so do not start saving loads of stuff.

 

[Simon T]

I don't know of any good ones, but there are both free and paid ones that work.

How can you fairly recommend a program if you don't know of any good ones or actual names of the "ones that work"?

 

[S0ULphIRE]

^He didn't recommend a program.
But Recuva is free and works pretty well.

 

[KSoD]

How can you fairly recommend a program if you don't know of any good ones or actual names of the "ones that work"?

I dont see anywhere in his reply where he names a specific program. He says that there are both free and paid ones that work.

The issue is this. No Recovery Program can work properly if you are using the same hard drive that your trying to recover files from. Hard Drives work like a dry erase board. You write something, erase it and write over it again. But you cant go back and get the first thing written on there after you already wrote something else on there. So the chances of you recovering your data goes less likely the more you use the machine. You need to get a program and run it now before all hope is lost. We have a topic dedicated to such things located here:

http://www.techist.com/forums/f9/recommended-software-certain-tasks-171255/