Previously: I had two drives in my machine: an IDE drive with one partition (C) and a SATA drive with two partitions (D and E). My system drive (with windows on it) was the D partition on the second drive.
Then: I needed some more space, and I decided that it'd be nice to get rid of the IDE drive so I could be rid of ribbon cables. I got a new 500 GB SATA drive, backup up the files on the IDE drive, and gave the IDE drive away to a friend in need. After removing the IDE drive, the partitions on my previous SATA drive moved a letter each (D became now-C, E became now-D) and the new drive became E.
Next: I reinstalled windows onto the same partition but in a different folder because I realized I'd forgot to back up the now-C partition, and I intended on just copying over the data and then erasing the partition and putting a clean windows install into C:\Windows. I walked away after starting the install and came back to a horrible scenario - windows was running a boot-time checkdisk and "fixing" tons of files on the now-D partition without being able to see the full drive (because the proper mobo drivers were not installed) and so it was almost certaintly corrupting perfectly fine files until I stopped the checkdisk (by forcefully restarting when nothing else seemed to have any impact on it).
Now: Windows recognizes the partition but not the file system on it (it had/has NTFS) - the drive properties sheet says it has 0 bytes total, and the disk manager says that partition is 100% empty. The drive had a ton of data on it that I really need, and while I do have some of it backed up, I haven't done a backup in a few months and I'd really like to recover the latest versions of everything if at all possible.
Request: Is there any software you recommend that can recover data from a partition that windows doesn't properly recognize? I have plenty of room on my new drive to store any recovered data. I'm willing to pay for something if it has some way to demonstrate it's utility before I must do so.
Then: I needed some more space, and I decided that it'd be nice to get rid of the IDE drive so I could be rid of ribbon cables. I got a new 500 GB SATA drive, backup up the files on the IDE drive, and gave the IDE drive away to a friend in need. After removing the IDE drive, the partitions on my previous SATA drive moved a letter each (D became now-C, E became now-D) and the new drive became E.
Next: I reinstalled windows onto the same partition but in a different folder because I realized I'd forgot to back up the now-C partition, and I intended on just copying over the data and then erasing the partition and putting a clean windows install into C:\Windows. I walked away after starting the install and came back to a horrible scenario - windows was running a boot-time checkdisk and "fixing" tons of files on the now-D partition without being able to see the full drive (because the proper mobo drivers were not installed) and so it was almost certaintly corrupting perfectly fine files until I stopped the checkdisk (by forcefully restarting when nothing else seemed to have any impact on it).
Now: Windows recognizes the partition but not the file system on it (it had/has NTFS) - the drive properties sheet says it has 0 bytes total, and the disk manager says that partition is 100% empty. The drive had a ton of data on it that I really need, and while I do have some of it backed up, I haven't done a backup in a few months and I'd really like to recover the latest versions of everything if at all possible.
Request: Is there any software you recommend that can recover data from a partition that windows doesn't properly recognize? I have plenty of room on my new drive to store any recovered data. I'm willing to pay for something if it has some way to demonstrate it's utility before I must do so.