How can I recover data off an unpartitioned hard disk?? Please Help

[EmoBoy]

I let my friend borrow my 80gb storage hard drive to copy some files I had and when I got it back windows showed the drive as being raw unpartitioned space. The drive was once NTFS and his drive was fat32 so he wasnt able to read it at all and I dont know what he did to it cause I havnt seen him sence I got the drive back.

Also, when I plug the hard drive in it is recognised in windows but says it needs to be formated. Windows slows down to a crawl when its pluged in also.

I am running windows xp. I thought that when I checked the properties of the drive the first time when I got it back that Windows showed that there was still data on the drive even though i couldnt read it. It doesnt say that anymore.

Does anyone know what I could do to recover my 70GB of personal files?? Also, if there is any other information you need let me know and I'll get it.
I have tried norton utilities with no sucess.

 

[smokey7722]

Best bet, and what I have always used (including doing data recovery at my old job...), is with Ontrack Easy Recovery Pro. Best dang software I've ever used for recovery!

 

[dude]

Don't know if it's worth your time and trouble (and $) but any Forensic Disk utility will recover that for you, even if it's been formatted and partitioned later.

Forget Norton, it won't find it and it's slower than molasas.

 

[EmoBoy]

Can anyone recomend any other good programs to use?? Please.

 

[smokey7722]

My only rec is Ontrack.

 

[stevewm]

I'd recommend GetDataBack (http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm), they have FAT and NTFS versions. I've had to use this program twice, (partition table got wiped thanks to a old boot virus on a floppy, and then I picked the wrong partition to format during a Linux install) it was able to scan the drive and let me copy my files off it.