Das Werkstatt

Why are we telling you that this proggy is cool? Very easy. Check the following story out!

there i was. My CPU burned out, exactly two weeks after i could have got a free replacement. It also killed my motherboard, but not the RAM (lucky me). So, what did i do? Right! I went to get myself a new box, mostly.

I went to a local computer store, buying a XP 2800+ (now Oc'd to 3200 /o probs, running at 50° Celsius), a additional 120 GB IDE HDD, 512 MB of 333 Mhz RAM, and a new motherboard with a Nforce2 Chipset.

But, after i put together the new box and put in my old HDD's, what had i to discover! OMG! INVALID DRIVES! ARRRRRRRRRRRRGH!

All my personal videos, the files of the bands i legaly kept the files for, everything, GONE?!

NO!

I, after trying many, MANY tools for recovering HDD's on NTFS (and FAT32), could not get any results. The drive was THERE - assigned as Drive "J", but windows said its "Not formated. Do you want to format drive J: now?". But... it was formated! it was on NTFS!

In the end, windows didnt do shit. It said the partition is okay, and everything, but couldn't read out the FS.

After many tries, Restorer 2000 was the only proggy which could actually bring up a directory listing of the missing files. BUT, the demo version couldn't restore files over 64KB file size. DAMMIT!

After all, Das Werksatt bought the proggy.

We were able to recover 60GB og that 80GB drive! That is an awesome score, IMHO, and we totally dont regret buying that proggy.

The negative side, you ask?
Well, i once treid to recover files from a drive which got formated once, but no data was moved to it yet. It failed miserable, couldn't even bring up any bit of a lost file.

the positive?
even when Windows said that the drive was not really there, it could access it, and rescue most of the data.

After all, i guess its a personal choice - but, for the famous "lost NTFS partition" talk - try the demo. If it reads out the directory listing on the partition, it might as well get out most of the data - ALIVE! And that for a very acceptable price, we think!

- Gil

just thougth I'd give an alternative way to all the ppl out there who either don't have the resources to buy that kind of program or who are just downright too honest to crack it

I think one way to recover that data might have been by using Linux. Install linux on a separate harddrive. When booting, linux should mount to NTFS hd automatically, or just do that manually using the mount command. That should give you access to the drive's content.
Please keep in mind that, as far as I know, Linux can't write to NTFS partitions yet so you'll only be able to copy data from the NTFS hd to the Linux one. From there, burn it on cd....

Hope that helps

Remember: Linux kicks ASS

If it was that easy, we wouldn't have bought that program. In fact, the FS information was lost due a physical damage to the first sector of the Harddisk, and unfortunately the last sector too, where the backup of the FS is kept. Even linux cant mount a drive if it can't find a valid FS.

Restorer 2000 scanned the harddisk for all unfragmented files it couuld find by header, and for NTFS MFTs (Master File Tables), and could after a few hours list all valid files which are able to be restored.

We've tested a lot of different Data Recovery tools, but only Restorer 2000 was able to restore most of the data on the Harddisk.

As for putting the HDD in a linux box - sure, thats usually the first thing i do when a HDD is not mountable in windows anymore. In this case, as said, the FS information was lost, and only a deep scan of the whole drive and then building a virtual NTFS in memory to extract the data, helped.

- Gil

...just a hint for some who might not know:

There are several distros of linux which run directly OFF the CD -
no installation necessary, which is ideal for recovery.

//a quite comprehensive list of CD-live-distros:
http://www.hrlug.org/cddistro.html

for the fully-featured-workstation flair, try "Knoppix"
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html