data recovery

January 14, 2005 11:10 AM

Can anyone recommend a very good data recovery tool? After installing a new secondary HD, XP decided that my tertiary drive was corrupted and "fixed" it for me.
posted by geckoinpdx to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

How was the drive formatted and how did XP fix it for you?
posted by Mitheral at 12:37 PM on January 14, 2005

Response by poster: After resizing my C drive, chkdisk popped up and reported errors on my E drive (which is on a different physical drive and did not change). It forced the corrections (didn't ask for confirmation) and gave me pages of
Deleting orphan file record segment XXXX

Once it finished, I basically had an empty E drive.
posted by geckoinpdx at 12:45 PM on January 14, 2005

I use a program called "Bad Copy Pro", have used it mostly for old floppies (old accounting data backed up on *GASP* floppies); This has worked well for me. Although, you might be boned with XP "fixing" it for you. I suppose it is worth looking into.
posted by AllesKlar at 1:05 PM on January 14, 2005

I have heard very good things about Get Data Back, though I have never used it myself.
posted by arco at 1:19 PM on January 14, 2005

Response by poster: Thanks, I'll look into that.

I've had some luck with GetDataBack but it totally b0rked the mp3s I was trying to restore.
posted by geckoinpdx at 1:22 PM on January 14, 2005

I used the instructions here to get data off a hard drive that was going bad. It was pretty involved and took a few days, but it was also pretty satisfying.

It is pretty low-level, though, and it helps if you know your way around unix command lines.
posted by QIbHom at 10:41 AM on January 15, 2005