Wow!!
What a nightmare adventure this has been (read past posts to see)!! 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…..Finally I found a solution and it actually works!
Why the computer tech didn’t know is beyond me.
I found a simple, low cost effective program that will recover lost data from a completely inaccessible drive and it can even fix the drive so that you can access it again! Compared to $350-800 and/or the loss of my irreplaceable files, the cost of this solution to get my files back is a steal.
The software is developed by DataRecovery and the specific program that I found effective at getting my data back is called iRecover. They have a free trial download to assess your system before you commit to purchase. Another program they have, will fix corrupt boot files and rebuild partition tables to access the dead drive. It is called DiskPatch. Again they have a free trial download that you can run a full scan with. The Link is at the top, Downloads.
I have successfully run this software on two drives, a 160 gig and a 300 gig. I have salvaged/restored ALL my photos, music and document! ALL! And the computer tech couldn’t do it. Sure glad I didn’t send the drives away to be taken apart @ $500+/drive.
Feel free to share your experience with this software.
Tags: data recovery, data recovery software, hard drive data recovery, laptop data recovery, ntfs data recovery, restore photos, restored data, salvage data, undelete photos
June 17th, 2008 at 11:56 pm
Its interesting. After I managed to salvage my data, I decided to try and format the drive. So I downloaded a free partition manager, Cute Partition Manager. This little piece of software is really Cool. It is open source, so free, no strings attached, just download, create your boot disk and partition.
http://www.cutepm.com/
I ran this on a brand new HD to test it out. It worked like a charm, I could even create the partition as FAT32.
So I ran it on the dead drive, found the partition, deleted it, recreated a new one, same size and then rebooted the system. I easily formated the new partition and have now salvaged a dead HD, that the tech said was Hooped!
Pretty cool hey!