Free/Cheap HDD recovery software?

Chris1712

Chris1712

Chris1712

Soldato
Joined
29 Jul 2004
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Morning all, thanks to the brilliance of the mac os I managed to reformat y external backup drive, fortunately i stopped the process before it really killed much, but the logical drive is very much gone.

Over the last 2 days or so i have tried a few different recovery suites and none have been quite what im looking for. Firstly, i tried Stellar Pheonix Windows Data Recovery, which is fantastic and the demo version finds my logical drives quickly and contains all the directories etc.
Unfortunately the $99 license is a bit big to swallow. If anyone can 'help' with this its greatly apprecieated.

Next up we have PC Inspector File Recovery.
This has been excellent thus far, it found my logical drives (and even some old partition formatted many times over!!), it took a lot longer however (around 6 hours!) and now I've come to actually recovering files its very iffy. Quite often it will crap out mid process, and won't work again until you restart. The problem with this is it doesnt remember previous logical drive locations, so i have to deep scan again (6 hours!!)


Any suggestions of software i could try, Stellar Pheonix is seemingly bang on but i cant really afford the license just now, its hard weighing up £50 against 500gb of tv/music/documents. I want something that will find old logical partitions, with there directories/structures.


Help :(.


Cheers.
 
Not free if files are larger than 64KB but the best you can get and cost about $49

Use search and see how bad my drive was and it got 100% files back and a few others peeps I pluged it to, think 1 guy had a totaled drive thats had no chance of getting back though.

http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm


If your files are important, you WILL pay to get them back, and learn to back up next time.
 
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helmutcheese said:
Not free if files are larger than 64KB butr the best you can get and cost about $49

Use search and see how bad my drive was and it got 100% files back and a few others peeps I pluged it to, think 1 guy had a totaled drive thats had no chance of getting back though.

http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm


If your files are important, you WILL pay to get them back, and learn to back up next time.
Click to expand...

Cheers giving that whirl now, how long did it take yourself? Its been goin 45 mins or so now and is sat on 2% :confused:.
 
Need to set to Long/slow Method and I would let it look for Deleted/Recycled files, it took about 45mins on a 150GB Raptor that had File Sytem nuked due to mobo frying.

Got all files back.
 
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Hmmm left that going overnight and its sat at 4%. I've got a feeling me using all these recovery apps has actually damaged the partition even more now, as previous apps are also taking a lot longer.
 
I'm going to suggest GetDataBack - but I'm not sure what file system you used to store the data, and GDB only supports NTFS and FAT. :(
 
Yup the drives completely knacked now, bad sectors all over the place to the point where nothing will read it.

Oh well, luckily most of my music is on my mp3 player just many tv/films etc. lost. And some of my favourite porn :(.
 
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