Data Recovery Challenge

[Northerly]

Hi All,

I'm having serious issues trying to recover some important data lost from some hard disks.

Here's what happened...

My Computer:
40 Gb HDD NTFS (C:,F: running the OS)
120 Gb HDD NTFS (D: Used as data drive)
120 Gb HDD NTFS (E: Also used as data drive)

My W2K was running like a dog so I decided to reformat my disk and reinstall W2K. While I was there I decided to install WinME too.

I ran the WinME CD Boot disk which informed me that it couldn't work with NTFS disks, it continued and went and added FAT32 partitions on my data drives' previously empty 8Mb partitions that were left by W2K.

I gave up on installing WinME and went and ran my W2K boot disk. From there, I deleted these new FAT32 partitions that WinME created, which left just the original partitions on my data drives.

When W2K finished installing and when it started up, it said that the D: and E: were corrupt and W2K recommended that I check for consistency. It didn't give me a chance to decline and it begun.

It then started displaying something like "DELETING CORRUPT FILE" and "DELEING ORPHAN FILE" faster than you could read it. This went on for about 15 mins.

I've since run demos of R-Studio,Restorer2000 and GetDataBack, none of which even find any of the files I had on.

These are irreplacable files of which I've spent thousands of hours on.

If anyone can suggest anything that might help me, I would be greatly appreciative.

 

[wolluf]

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

is free - but not good with damaged ntfs partitions.

http://www.winternals.com

have an ntfs recovery tool - but it costs.

 

[jmatt]

http://2003.pricelessware.org/PL2003FILEUTILITIES.htm#UndeleteTool

Drive Rescue (freeware) OS: Win9x/NT/ME/2000/XP
(English)
Drive Rescue is a program for exploring your hard disk, and locating lost files on it. The idea
for this program originated from processing a disk with Scandisk--which suddenly contained no
data. Since off-the-shelf Windows methods could not recover any of it, this program was
successfully created, to find important information of the file system, to look for lost data
and to restore it.
Program description:

http://woundedmoon.org/win32/driverescue19d.html

Download v1.9d (1,007,746 bytes)

http://woundedmoon.org/win32/driverescue19d.zip

-----------------------------------------

http://home19.inet.tele.dk/svolaf/utilities.htm

Only weighing in under 2k, and taking up about 3-5k of memory, this little device driver scans
your entire drive for lost partitions, it then assigns read-only drive letters to them to allow
you to recover data.