data recovery

[gristur]

A couple of days ago my laptop died badly (e.g. hard drive partitions, and boot files). I was trying to save my docs and pictures so I booted from a CD and used Volkov Commander 4.06 (or 4.07... or so) to access my files.
Then I connected my USB external hard drive (FAT32, Fantom Drive 500gb RAID) and to my big surprise, I could access this drive (as well as my laptop drive) from Volkov. So I simply decided to copy my data from one drive to another.
It took about 7 hours to do so. After the process was completed, I opened my external hard drive, and got stunned… Not only new data, but also all previous data became an mess… Every singe file and folder name has changed into something like £¥€????. The save dates now range from 1900 to 2100.
The only thing I could think about at this point is to run Norton Doctor and take care of lost chains. After process was done I got a nice hard drive with 0 files and 0 folders left. Its properties show, however, that the drive still has 460gb of 500gb full. I really need some pros help. I can undo the Norton Doctor procedure. Can I recover my data? At least in theory?
Please help. Data is very important for me.

 

[eyec]

you can try WinHex
access the physical drive
use the Recovery option
good luck

 

[michaelcoulter]

you could also try using a dos based version of ghost to image the drive to a seperate drive and then use ghost again to restore the files to a different location.