Need help with data recovery

[Cybordolphin]

I am looking for a good data recovery program. Seems there are more data recovery programs out now than cracks for VISTA.

Can anyone recommend a good (hopefully easy to use), program that really does a good job, and preferrably shows lots of detail while doing its magic?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Rather than just pick a program out of the hat.... I am hoping to find one that has already been used with great success by others.

Thanks

 

[ScottMac]

I've had good luck with WinHex ( I bought the Forensic flavor ).

I think they have a free (possibly cripppled) demo, so you could evaluate whether it will work for your situation.

Depending on what caused the drive to crash, you may not be able to recover it with only software. For example, the old IBM DeskStar (DeathStar) and the ever-famous "Click of Death" ... if the logic board has failed, then software will not be able to accurately read the information off of the platters: Your only option at that point is to get a similar drive and swap in the new logic board.

IF it is mearly a data/formatting problem, you can make a quickie backup using "dd" (disk dump) ... available in Knoppix "Linux-on-a-CD" it will make a raw image that you can sort through with other applications.

If you *do* get WinHex (or similar application) DON'T DO ANYTHING until you make a bit-perfect copy (verifiable with an MD5 hash) to an image. Most applications of this type can operate on the image as if it were a physical drive ... hence, saving your drive as a master copy (also preserves the evidence value in court) ... ALWAYS (as possible) work on an image ... make a couple copies in case you screw one up .... NEVER work on the only copy (i.e., the original trashed drive) of your valuable data ... screw up once, and it's a goner with no practical hope of recovery.

If the program can't make a reasonable backup, chances are you have a hardware logic problem .. try it on another machine, if that doesn't work, swap in a new logic boad to the drive and try again.

There was also a company with a product {something} Commander I think ... I don't remember, and since they pimped me out of a few hundred dollars, I'm not inclined to recommend them. They're fairly popular with Enterprise customers and are rumored to have decent success at soft-error data recovery ... I don't know that for sure, since the copy I licensed completely failed and their support was all but completely worthless.

Good Luck

Scott

 

[Cybordolphin]

The hard drive is physically ok.

The hard drive was read as 100 gigger when reinstalled for a new OS install. Normally the BIOS/motherboard would have read the drive correctly, but this was a new VISTA install, and somehow it masked the true size of the drive, if that is possible. This was then thought to be the spare drive (a REAL 100 gig). When in actuality the drive was a 300 gig, and a new OS install was installed over the drive. The drive was also reformatted and repartitioned it looks like.

I believe the data is still there. Its just finding it. Looked like there was 90 gigs or so, now buried someplace amoungst the 300 gigs.

I want something REALLY easy to use. I don't have the patience for DOS scans, etc.. I just want to run the program, find the data and save. Hopefully from Windows OS.

Thanks again!

 

[Cybordolphin]

What I really want....

Is a file recovery program that is highly automated in that it will just find the lost files, and put them back into the same file structure as before. I really do not want to sift through 90 gig of data to try to find out what might and might not be important to the end user.

If the program would reinstate the same file structure, that would make it a snap to locate files for the end user.

Anyway... hope to get more input. Thanks again