directory to file...

[galiganu]

Hi,

I have a 160 Gb seagate harddrive with only one FAT32 partition on it. This drive was for storage only. It was about 140 Gb data on it.

Two days ago I decided to install a fresh copy of WinXp on this drive. So I made a directory called storage where I put all the data. The scandisk from WinXP told me after 5 minutes o testing that the disk has fatal error and have to exit.

After that I put the harddisk on other computer and instead of directory 'storage' I found that I have the file 'storage' of 32kb. The system reports that free space is 21 Gb from 160 Gb. So the data is still there... But where?
How can I get it back?

Thank You.

 

[Freestone]

Many forum members have reported good success with the following (not free):

GetDataBack - Do-it-yourself Data Recovery Software

Mixed results reported with (freeware):

PC INSPECTOR File Recovery

You may also want to post in forum528

 

[YellowOnline]

I totally agree with Firestone, as I use GetDataBack for recovery myself. Truly a great program! (No, I don't get money for saying this )

You do need to recover to another drive than the one you are recovering (otherwise it would overwrite), so to recover 140GB of data you'll need another HD with at least 140GB free.

My advice: don't write anything to your HD, buy another big HD (I guess the data is worth to buy one), make it the Master HD and install Windows (and any other software you want), get GetDataBack and start recovering.

A slight warning: depending on the speed of your computer, it magh take quite a while to recover 140GB of data. It took me 14 hours to recover 80GB on an AMD 400 with 128MB RAM, to give you an idea. But I guess your computer is better than that one

Peace,

Yellow