Recovery of Photos

[Gralynne]

Someone in family did factory restore and the photos and files did not back up is there a way to recover them

[WAWood]

@Gralynne

Hello;

Allow me to welcome you to the HP forums!

A factory restore involved erasing the entire contents of the hard drive -- but, in many cases, the files are not actually wiped from the drive.

Your best bet for recovering data now is to do the following:
1) Remove the hard drive from the PC
2) Purchase a USB-to-Hard Driver adapter kit (like the one illustrated below)

3) Download and install this utility on a working PC: http://www.majorgeeks.com/news/story/recover_data_in_3_steps_with_minitool_power_data_recovery_free_...
4) Connect the old drive to the working PC
5) Run the data recovery utility to see what can be retrieved from the old drive.

If that tools does not find what you need, an alternative is Recuva: http://www.piriform.com/recuva

And, if that does not work well, the best tool out there is this one, but only the trial version is free: http://www.file-recovery.com/