Data Recovery Needed - Help!

[arjay13]

My bios sees the hard drive but won't boot off of it. I think that the MBR is corrupted and the partion info seems corrupted as well. I don't want to pay big bucks for the recovery. Does anyone know of reasonably priced software for the task? Easyrecovery by Ontrack is $200. Too pricey for my needs.

[Sterling_Aug]

You get what you pay for.

It sounds like you should kiss the data goodbye and simply format and reinstall the system.

[Imperion1]

Need more info.

What makes you think the MBR and partition info is corrupted?
What error do you receive when you try booting up?
You didn't try to fdisk with all the info on the drive did you?

[arjay13]

I was having some network problems and decided to scan the drive with macaffee. I think I said yes instead of no when the virus scan asked me about a change it saw in the mbr. I think it restored a backup copy of the mbr. Next time I tried to boot it counnt find command.com. Then I noticed thgat one of the three partions was gone, One couldnt be read at all (though seen) and the c: was readable but not bootable.

[jhansen_oldsalt]

You may want to give Norton a shot, SystemWorks 2001 is readily available for well under $20.

If that fails, PowerQuest used to make a very resonably priced product called Lost & Found that you may be able to find second-hand. It's not quick, but it works well.

There's a utility called Recover4all you may want to look at http://www.recover4all.com/

Going up in price, you can also look at

Executive Software for their "UnDelete" utility, it works and is fairly reasonably priced at about $30.00 but is designed for NT

http://www.execsoft.com/products/products.asp

LC Technology makes one called Recover98 Express that's only $45.00

http://lc-tech.com/R98EXPRESSorderform.asp

or check out DTI's recovery product for $85.00

http://www.dtidata.com/products_ff_recovery.asp

There are others as well, but this gives you someplace to start.

[NDD]

Mail me and I'll send you some 1MB+ proggy, called "Revival", can achieve pretty amazing results sometimes.

Best Regards ...

[rjwilke]

Oldsalt, Thanks for the leads on recovery programs. Turns out that I had a copy of Lost and Found that I had purchased a couple of years back but never used. I think I have recovered most of what I needed to. Since I advise/help other people on their PC's (yes I KNOW that I let too much time pass between backups!) I'll check some of these other pgms out. Lost and Found gets registered to a specific PC,so you can't move it around. I don't know how many times it can be reused either.

Sterling, See above!


ND Got your email. Thanks alot. I'll try it this weekend.


All Thanks for the help. I'll return the favor whenever I can!

[NDD]

Drop me a few lines if it worked for you.

Best Regards ...

[digica]

Restorer2000 is a powerful data recovery software that can undelete files deleted accidentally in NTFS partitions, and can even recover data from formatted or corrupted drives.


Restorer2000 can recover files with foreign-language filenames, long filenames, NTFS-compressed filenames, and alternative data streams such as Windows 2000 file information. SmartScan technology, combined with the flexibility of adjusting parameters, gives you control over quick data reconstruction. Drive Images are useful for such tasks as recovering drives with bad sectors. The program's powerful algorithms also let you find and restore deleted files in just a few seconds.

http://www.b******.net

[Sea Walnut]

I don't want to sound like an idiot, and I know I'm not great with computers, but I know the basics. Have you tried sticking in a different drive that you KNOW works, boot off of that, then stick in the one that doesnt work as a SLAVE and work from there? Maybe I didn't get something, but that's what I would try to do. Of course, I've found it's more than worth the investment and agony to buy a crappo old hard drive, backup EVERYTHING with a complete drive copy program, then unplug it from the machine and that way you always have a backup without any **** work. Good luck, because I've been down those roads..

[PhilipOK]

Acronis products are much cheaper. The one that most of all fits you problem is disk editor deluxe. I've got it here at my PC for the cases if i need to recover some data. As far as i remember they have a demo version on their site - www.acronis.com.

Phil

[G]

ND to the rescue.

Nice one.

G