Help with hard drive recovery

[AdamAdsy]

hard drive was fine until until i rebooted my system without shutting down. When windows started up again it did a check and said it was fixing the hard drive. I noticed there was a problem when it said it was deleting orphan data right from the start of the drive (seperate partition from windows). So i rebooted again and told it to skip the check.

Now i find that 150GB+ of data has gone although windows is reporting the free space as if the data is there. I tried using R-studio to recover but it doesnt support drives bigger than 127GB but it does show that all the data is intact.

All i want to do now is use a program which will just do a simple undelete (so it doesnt require another hard drive to copy all the data over to).

Problem is, from searching google all the software is like $300+, are there any free or very cheap software which will do this simple recovery process?

[Rob R.]

What OS?

[AdamAdsy]

windows xp pro

[Rob R.]

start\programs\accessories\system tools\system restore

Roll your computer back to a point prior.

[AdamAdsy]

that removed all the service pack and windows update patches, it didn't touch the other partition though.

[Rob R.]

Did you just put all of that on? It should undo anything that has been done by your system scan after the reboot. Is there more that occured to cause this? What were you doing prior to this reboot?

[AdamAdsy]

just had one recovery point which i forced it to make when i installed windows, didn't have any others apart from that.

Im not sure the recovery is that good for things outside windows otherwise you would be able to format a drive and then roll the computer back and find that windows has managed to unformat during the roll back.

[Rob R.]

Normally the system scan will recover data and place it in a file for you that it creates. It will name it something obvious so you can easily identify it. You might do a search for files on that HD that have been modified/created today.

[AdamAdsy]

The windows system scan just goes delete happy, it doesnt try to recover anything.

Are there any recovery tools which support drives bigger than 127GB? I was looking at easyrecovery pro and for $500+ it doesnt even support them.

[Rob R.]

The system recovery tool will roll back changes made by the system scan. The system scan shouldn't delete anything either, it normally moves and renames it.

It appeared from your description that it was related to the system scan that initiated after the reboot, it apparently wasn't. I have never needed to use a data recovery tool so I cannot recommend one. Good luck though with this.

[G Ray88]

AdamAdsy, if nothing else works try checking a www.ontrack.com maybe they can help you, just a thought. Good Luck:t

[AllGamer]

try the $20 tools at www.ntfs.com

they worked well for me in the past

but they are not perfect, it helped me recover like 30% of my stuff only

:t

[AdamAdsy]

I managed to recover 80% of the data by re-installing the service pack and the other windows updates, i then formatted the whole damaged partition.

A mixture of getdataback and r-studio were then used to recover all the data before the 127GB limit. The rest of the data after that had been marked as bad sectors (probably by the windows system scan) and so had already been written over.

At least i have more hard drive space again :)