How to recover files from an acer emachines eM350 netbook that was factory reset and won’t turn on?

mwilli52
mwilli52 Member Posts: 3 New User
edited November 2023 in 2020 Archives
Six years ago, my brother factory reset my mother’s netbook (an acer emachines eM350 series) and she lost a bunch of photos of our childhood. My brother never tried to recover the files and it was eventually “forgotten” (no really - my mum still occasionally asks him to do it). I recently factory reset another old laptop and it gave me the option to keep the files, but wipe the computer and this reminded me of my mum’s netbook. I plugged her netbook in today and it just won’t turn on. I would really like to be able to recover these files for her, but I figure the standard recovery from a dead computer won’t really work since it was wiped. 

Does anybody know how to figure this out? These photos are super important to my mum. 

Answers

  • billsey
    billsey ACE Posts: 35,226 Trailblazer
    It depends on how much use the laptop got after the wipe and what's wrong with it now. I'm guessing is it's been sitting off the charger for several years the battery is pretty much toast. You may or may not be able to get it to run on AC. The factory restore rewrites only the sectors needed to copy the new files on, which means that there's a good chance of restoring data that's stored elsewhere on the disk. Same with a Windows reset. What I'd probably do, since the laptop is old enough it likely isn't all that useful any longer, is to pull the HDD out and use unerase tools on a different machine.
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  • mwilli52
    mwilli52 Member Posts: 3 New User
    billsey said:
    It depends on how much use the laptop got after the wipe and what's wrong with it now. I'm guessing is it's been sitting off the charger for several years the battery is pretty much toast. You may or may not be able to get it to run on AC. The factory restore rewrites only the sectors needed to copy the new files on, which means that there's a good chance of restoring data that's stored elsewhere on the disk. Same with a Windows reset. What I'd probably do, since the laptop is old enough it likely isn't all that useful any longer, is to pull the HDD out and use unerase tools on a different machine.
    It hasn’t been used since it was factory reset six years ago. I’ve removed the hard drive and ordered a USB to SATA cable to plug it in to my current laptop. 
  • billsey
    billsey ACE Posts: 35,226 Trailblazer
    Yeah, no need to boot from something else. Data recovery tools will work just fine with the drive mounted in a different computer. Let us know how many you are able to recover.
    Click on "Like" if you find my answer useful or click on "Yes" if it answers your question.
  • mwilli52
    mwilli52 Member Posts: 3 New User
    billsey said:
    Yeah, no need to boot from something else. Data recovery tools will work just fine with the drive mounted in a different computer. Let us know how many you are able to recover.
    I was able to recover 3000 photos, I just used the USB to SATA and plugged it into my current laptop and was able to recover it easily. 
  • StevenGen
    StevenGen ACE Posts: 12,918 Trailblazer
    edited August 2020
    mwilli52 said:
    Six years ago, my brother factory reset my mother’s netbook (an acer emachines eM350 series) and she lost a bunch of photos of our childhood. My brother never tried to recover the files and it was eventually “forgotten” (no really - my mum still occasionally asks him to do it). I recently factory reset another old laptop and it gave me the option to keep the files, but wipe the computer and this reminded me of my mum’s netbook. I plugged her netbook in today and it just won’t turn on. I would really like to be able to recover these files for her, but I figure the standard recovery from a dead computer won’t really work since it was wiped. 

    Does anybody know how to figure this out? These photos are super important to my mum. 

    I’m glad that you could recover the data “you are very lucky” as with other HDD that go broke, its not that easy! As and when a HDD's platter or heads or motor go broke it needs to be done professionally and as “billsey” also said “that it depends on how much use the laptop got after the wipe and what's wrong with it now” to how much data can be recovered, if it was not overwritten a second time!

    The latter happened to me with a 1TB HDD slave drive that just ceased to function, well its read/write head and arm became faulty. What I did is that I immediately stopped using that HDD and contacted a ‘Data Recovery Technician” and they said to not touch and/or use that HDD, as the sooner the data can be recovered professionally the more data that they can recover for me. I did that and they recovered 99.99% of the data, the only thing that they didn’t recover was a 4.5GB .iso game file but, they recovered all my photos, videos and all my personal files which I though was incredible. In saying all this I don’t know what your old Acer eM350 series has been used for or if its data usage was more than what it had before your brother factory reset your mother’s netbook? As that is what will determine what can be recovered.