experiences on data recovery tools ?

[baisha88]

During the installation of Windows 2000, I accidentally picked my data partition (6G in FAT32 format). Therefore, that data partition was formatted to NTFS, and covered by the newly installed Windows 2000 (1G). I hope I can rescue some files back from the un-overwritten part (around 5G).

I tried the demo version of Stellar Phoenix, which can view most of the old files on the wrongly formatted partition, and it is thinkable that they can be recovered.

Anyone has experiences on using the following tools? Which one can REALLY recover files from the wrongly installed partition (because from their description, they all can)?

Recover it all:
Restorer 2000:
VirtualLab Data Recovery 4.8.1:
Recover my files:
Filerecovery professional :
Lost and found:
GetDataBack:
HandyRecovery:
IRecover 1.0:
eData Unerase:
Stellar Phoenix:
File-Saver:

Any suggestions and feedback are appreciated!!

Baisha

 

[wolluf]

Baisha - did you post a similar question under a different handle in 4 different forums recently?

 

[baisha88]

Dear wolluf,

As I need to recover the loss under win2000 installation from win98, I thought the question is relevant with "hardware, windows98, win2000", so I did post to these three forums, not 4.

The last handle is deleted I think, and I followed the "contact forum management" link to explain, no reply yet.

As this is just a private issue on my account (I can only post here without your e-mail information), please delete this post after you see it, and if possible let me know more details about my previous handle's fate.

Thanks.

 

[wolluf]

One problem here is your question can't be answered. Any number of data recovery tools may do the job for you - but you won't know until you try. I think I said this in my reply to one of your earlier posts - but if you've run a demo version that's finding your data, what's stopping you going with that? No matter how good other apps are - they may NOT work with your exact situation - so recommendations are effectively useless. Also, you already have a long list of possibles - I'm sure a number of them have demo versions - its really down to you to investigate which works best for your situation.

 

[baisha88]

Dear wolluf,
The earlier posts from the other handle are deleted, so I haven't seen your previous answer. Sorry.

what stops me to try? I just don't want to risk about $100 to TRY each product, and end up with the 10th one works. So I want to know whether someone out there can narrow down the list.

And another risk is that possibly some products "writes" something to the damaged partition (although some claims not), then no matter how good the to-be-tried products are, the data has been further damaged.

Thanks for your go-ahead suggestion, anyway.

 

[jurgen36]

Try Runtime GetDataBack.
By accident I reformated my backupdrive as Linux reiser and installed Suse9.2 on it, it was originally using fat32. After I found out I used GetDataBack and could recover all my 38 Gbyte backupfiles. They checked out ok and I reinstalled the backups to a spare drive. So this programm seems to be working ok. Incidentally it does not write to the dammaged drive at all. For recovery you must have sufficient space on another drive. Good luck
Regards

Jurgen