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

mwilli52

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. 

billsey

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.