Hey guys, not very recently I downloaded the game Bioshock 1 to my computer and after about a week deleted the game entirely because I got bored of the game. I want to undelete it now and I know of all those undelete softwares like Recuva and stuff, I just tried about 3 of them and I wasn't able to recover the game. I want to get the game back to play it again but I deleted it about 3 months ago. I don't know if that's too long ago to get it back.

Any ideas?

No I do not have the disc for the game anymore.

Buy it on Steam

I seriously doubt you'll be able to recover files deleted over 3 months ago

When you say you deleted it, do you mean uninstalled? Or did you just go to the game files and click delete?

If the latter, maybe they're in your recycle bin? Otherwise you're pretty screwed.

Anyway, where did you download it from? Can't you just re-download it if it was from Steam or D2D or something like that?

I went to the Program Files and deleted the entire file all together. Then I went to the Recycling Bin and emptied it. I got the PC disk from eBay and do not have the disk anymore. So that's where the issue arises.

As said there is probably no chance of recovering the files, and as you no longer have the disc you will just have to buy it again.

Get a hex editor, open the disk, and trawl through the entire hard drive byte by byte looking for the pointers to each file segment, restoring them as you go.
My signature will help, godspeed.

He does not have the disk anymore, per his opening post.

OP - I just recently decided I wanted to replay Fable of all things, and without the disk, which I had given away ages ago, I had to purchase a new copy. Fortunately it was reasonably inexpensive. Bioshock on Steam or whatever is also relatively inexpensive these days. Buy the game again.

As in Hard Disk, not Compact Disc :wink_smile:

That will only help if he hasn't written anything to that part of the harddrive in the past three months.

Naw, he could rent a scanning electron microscope and recover the rest of the data bit by bit.

Developing a time machine may be more practical

The ability to remove programs exists for a reason. They don't just go hiding somewhere - they cease existing.

There's always going to be a fragment somewhere. That's how cops catch pedophiles with kiddie porm on their comps. They can wipe their computer clean, but it leaves a permanent mark on their hard drive. The police just have the means to find it.

So I guess it's a lost cause, unless I somehow manage to get police tech.

Actually, they're not removed at all from your HD. The space is simply flagged to be made free to save new things onto. It's quite easy to recover deleted files if you haven't overwritten them.

"police tech" can't do half the things you see them do in movies and tv shows. Recovering 3 month old data from an HDD that has been in constant use since is impossible.


and since the data is 3 month old it's extremely likely that it has been overwritten entirely, or at least partially.

I know; I was just commenting on Pistolero's post.

OP, where did you download the game from? Most online distributors allow you to redownload a game via your account if you already paid for it.

A photo is much smaller than a game, and in order to convict, the investigators need only find a few pictures from a library of (often) a few hundred. Recovering a few pictures from an incomplete library and recovering every file from a 6.5 gigabyte game are two massively different things.

I'm sure you'd manage, with the forensic technology available to police, to recover evidence that Bioshock was once installed on your computer, but you almost certainly wont be able to recover the whole thing in playable form. You're stuck.

This method hasn't worked for the past 2+ years...

Well, except with those super microscopes. But the vast majority of them are unable to do forensics on hard drives anymore due to the increase in density.


Anyway, as others have said, it's too late by now probably. File recovery has a small window where you need to take the drive offline to keep new writes from overwriting your data.

Secure operating systems will overwrite freed-up blocks in order to reduce the possibility of recovering data, though most don't since it can cause quite a performance hit. Which is admittedly rather pedantic since most PC users won't be running at that sort of security level!

It is sometimes possible to recover data even after it's been overwritten, as already mentioned, though I suspect that the majority of anecdotal retellings of such occurrences are simply that.

As for the disk/disc thing, that's largely a US/non-US spelling difference; though there's a sort of unwritten standard suggesting one means magnetic and the other means optical in much the same way as the program/programme spelling referring to computer instructions and television shows respectively, it's a bit hazardous to make assumptions, though I probably only say that as I write "hard disc" since I think "disk" looks weird.

You might be able to see the files through the shadow volume. I have recovered data from up to 2 months from there. http://www.shadowexplorer.com/ is a great program for that. Other then that, there is no recovering the data. I sometimes have luck recovering files from a week ago using various open source and commercial recovery programs, but even they are somewhat limited in what they can do.

What operating systems do that by default? Seriously, I want to know.

VMS will do it, at least in its hardened incarnation (I think all flavours of VMS can be configured to do it as standard, but it's been a long time so I could be wrong); I'd hazard a guess that any operating system with a C2 or better security rating can do so, though I'm not absolutely certain that it's a requirement.