General Data Recovery Software - Win7-64

[Arkaign]

Hi guys,

Thought I would check in and see if anyone could suggest some data recovery programs to get data off of a hard drive under Win7-64, or if not W7-64, then perhaps something easily compatible with a NTFS partition formatted under W7-64. I have anything from Win2k SP4 to Win7 in 32 or 64 bit available to run recovery apps on.

Drive is a 500gb Hitachi 2.5" external drive in a usb enclosure. If necessary, I can pull the drive out of the case, the data is more valuable than the drive by far.

Thanks AT!

 

[Alfi]

Hi guys,

Thought I would check in and see if anyone could suggest some data recovery programs to get data off of a hard drive under Win7-64, or if not W7-64, then perhaps something easily compatible with a NTFS partition formatted under W7-64. I have anything from Win2k SP4 to Win7 in 32 or 64 bit available to run recovery apps on.

Drive is a 500gb Hitachi 2.5" external drive in a usb enclosure. If necessary, I can pull the drive out of the case, the data is more valuable than the drive by far.

Thanks AT!

Hi
One of the leading data recovery software tools is Recover My Files - I know you can select it to operate at different levels - straight deleted file recovery, partition level, physical disk etc. The free trial lets you preview files (not all filetypes, but a lot) so you can see what it finds before buying.

Best to download it to a different disk than the one you want to recover data from to avoid overwriting the data you want to recover.

Good luck.

 

[Modelworks]

What is the nature of the problem ? Is it a failed drive ? Bad partitioning ?
Really the software to use depends on what the problem may be.

 

[strep3241]

There is a program called File Scavenger that I know works because I just had to use it. It costs $50 to recover the files but is free to scan. Just be prepared, it takes a while to scan.

 

[Arkaign]

What is the nature of the problem ? Is it a failed drive ? Bad partitioning ?
Really the software to use depends on what the problem may be.

Well the drive was in an external usb enclosure (retail hitachi simpledrive mini), and it got banged while it was running. It ran for a couple of days afterwards, but rapidly deteriorated (hanging windows explorer, getting stuck on copying data off / cyclic redundancy check), and now on boot it reports SMART error and says the partitions need to be formatted.

Recover My Files is chewing on the thing now under the 'drive recovery option', by my calculation 50 hours is the time for the first step to be complete, and after that hopefully it won't take 50 hours to select and copy the probable ~40gb out of 400gb used that I don't have backed up anywhere else.

Wish me luck

EDIT : Oops, listed wrong software, am trying to get RMF to work, but also have a trial of GetDataBack to try as well.

 

[strep3241]

File Scavenger does not take nearly that long, at least not for me. For me, it took about 1 hour and 30 minutes to scan a 120gb drive and about 10 minutes to recover the files.

 

[Arkaign]

Well, the speed picked up towards the end, but it found zero files. Trying GetDataBack now, if that is a no go might try File Scavenger. Did you try it on a damaged drive?

 

[ElenaP]

Still, it would be useful to know the nature of the problem. Might be that the drive is needed to be imaged first, if there is a mechanical problem involved.

 

[bluwing]

Hi,

A program that worked great for me when none of the others found any files was Recuvva from the same people that make Ccleaner.

bluwing

 

[Modelworks]

Use MHDD for recovery . It can recover any drive that can be recovered using software. If it can't do it then you will need to send it to a professional .

http://hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

MHDD is different from the other software mentioned. It doesn't depend on anything but the hardware in your pc. It doesn't use an OS and even bypasses the motherboard BIOS using direct access.

Most people are not aware that the bios is not required to access a hard drive and so MHDD can get around those drive hangs at POST problems.
You will need to create a floppy to boot it from and have a spare drive ready. It can image the bad drive onto the good drive and you can work with that image to try to recover files.

 

[abaez]

I've used Recuva before. And also R-Studio undelete or something like that. Both were excellent.

 

[wayliff]

GetDataBack for NTFS. (www.runtime.org)

Works some serious magic. I have recovered business and personal data using it.

As others have suggested make a digital image first and recover from it.

 

[benji_m]

I have used lsofts livecd in the past. Worked for any drive that was accessible to the system after booting.