Unformat, How to Recover From a Dead HD

Wow!! What a nightmare adventure this has been!!

For background see posts; My PC Trouble Gets Worse Motherboard on the Fritz & Dead HD, What to do? And what to do next time?

System crash, dead hard drives, both my main drive and my backup drive, inspection from a tech resulted in referral to full blow dissection and internal repair of my drives at from $350-800/drive!! Then I found an open source program that recovered much of my data, but renamed it all and created a mess of 84 thousand files for me to figure out…..There was no way I would ever be able to review all those files to figure out what they where and rename them. Unfortunately there doesn't, seem to be an easy Free way. But still, I really felt there had to be something cheaper than $350-800 per drive. I ended up using a program called iUndelete ($50). Its main function is to recover data, which it did perfectly, no crashes, no renaming files and I got it all back. The drives were still toast, but I got my data back.

Obviously, the moral of this experience is, ALWAYS keep a backup of your files and system setting. I bought another program to assist me in this, Acronis True Image Backup Utility ($50). The program worked fairly well and I relied on it for quite awhile, since originally writing this post. But since, I have had further data corruption issues and wasn't able to figure it all out. My system has been running slowly, and locks up. I tried multiple restores without solving the problem. I did some research on paid software solutions to speed up and stabilize my system. I found lots of great product reviews for a variety of programs, including Acronis and iUndelete.

However, I came across Spotmau PowerSuite and discovered it could do all the tasks my other two programs I already bought could and a whole bunch of other tools for management and protection of my PC and data. With this software I can keep my PC running fast and stable, back up and protect my data, restore lost data, even create and manage partitions on my hard drives. I spent $100 on two programs that, while good programs, could not come close to doing what this program can for $50. In my experience, it would easily cost $200+ to buy separate programs to accomplish what this one program does.