Data recovery problem (formatted HD)

[Phil Hopkins]

Hi Chaps,

When I built my new PC, I kept the old primary drive out of my old machine and used it as the slave drive in my new one. I formatted it and since then it's remained completely empty. I've since discovered (over 12 months on), that I had some quite important things on there that I neglected to back up.

I downloaded a piece of software last night that worked like a charm, it scanned the drive, located the data, even allowed me to preview the pics etc. It didn't however allow me to save it as that bit was disabled in the demo version (bah). Now, I could go and spend $70 and pay for this product but at this moment in time I don't have $70.

My question is this: Does anyone know of any Freeware apps that will do the same thing? Or am I completely buggered until I next get paid?

[twister]

Take a look at the following:

Restoration
File Recovery
Free Undelete

Disclaimer time... I've not needed to use any of these for recovering stuff off a formatted drive, but they do seem to work pretty well at recovering stuff that's been removed via shift-delete or emptying the recycle bin.

[Phil Hopkins]

Thanks for your help there, i'll give them a whirl and let you know how I get on!

[BliarOut]

Restorer2000 is about £20. Not free but well worth the money

[Phil Hopkins]

That worked an absolute treat BliarOut!

Many thanks.

[BliarOut]

Glad it worked for you! The best bit is you can download an eval to see if it can find your files before you buy the full version. IIRC the eval one will even recover files <64K in size.

I got a (daft) mates one and only set of baby pictures back with it!

[Phil Hopkins]

Aye, I managed to pull a few pics off that i'd lost. Now to stump up the twenty notes and get all my other data!

I'm very impressed with how easy it was to use. A lot of the packages i tried were absolutely useless.