Data Recovery -- what's the best program?

[celeritas]

I recently lost 2 weeks of data... I tried to resuscitate my partitions and recover my files with:

PowerQuest Lost & Found v1.06
PowerQuest Partition Magic Pro v6
Norton Disk Doctor v2000
Ontrack Easy Recovery Pro v5.10
Ontrack Fix-it v3.0 & v2000
Winternals ERD Commander v2000

None of them were successful, though Ontrack ERP salvaged a handful of uncorrupted files. Just some internet shortcuts and text files...

What is the best program you've used to get your data back? I haven't tried Winternals Disk Commander yet, but it looks promising. Has anyone used it? Thanks.

 

[celeritas]

Anyone?

I ran the Disk Commander trial version last night, and I saw more files than I did with any other recovery program. What's even more amazing is that after pretty much giving up hope that I'd get anything back I repartitioned, reformatted, reinstalled Windows, and partially restocked the drive. That's just plain cool.

Of course, I can't actually restore anything until I pay $300. Ontrack ERP's recovery preview showed a lot of files, too -- but only after they were restored did I discover that they were actually corrupted.

 

[Harv22222]

I've used Nortons UnErase Wizard before, and got some of the files back. How did you lose these files in the first place?? Once you start putting files where the old ones were, to my knowledge they are gone. But try UnErase Wizard. GL

 

[celeritas]

I didn't try unerase because I thought it only brought back files that were deleted since it was installed in the system.

Sandra was benchmarking my drive this weekend, and I think it was interacting with the partition at a deep level when I closed it. I got a fatal error BSOD and my partitions and data disappeared afterwards...

I'm really impressed with Disk Commander trial so far. I might just choke up the $300 for it. Then again, I have most of the stuff backed up on other drives. 2 weeks of data is gone, though.

 

[Staver]

This one from Steve Gibson :Spinrite

 

[celeritas]

Q: Will SpinRite run on any non-FAT partitions such as NTFS, HPFS, Linux, etc?

A: No. SpinRite currently only operates upon FAT format partitions.

Q: Can I use a program like NTFSDOS.EXE, which allows DOS to "see" NTFS format partitions, to get SpinRite to run on my NTFS partition??

A: No, that won't work. NTFSDOS "interprets" the NTFS file system format for DOS so that DOS can "see" NTFS formatted files as if they were FAT format files. But SpinRite operates underneath DOS, directly with the physical file system stored on the hard disk drive. Thus a "device driver" like NTFSDOS won't help SpinRite to "see" the NTFS files.

I need something that works with Windows 2000 NTFS...