Data Recovery Software

[Black Sand Cable]

I had one of my pc's go up in smoke the other day and as a result it now wont boot. I tried to rebuild the boot menu via the normal methods and nothing seems to be working.

I ended up pulling the hard drive out as the computer is toast anyway and hooked it up via USB to another computer but my new problem is that I can only access one of the two partitions. I can see both partitions but can only access one.

Has anybody ever used any of the data recovery software that is floating around? If so, which one actually worked for you?

Below are a few examples of some that I have found:

www.highergroundsoftware.com

www.ontrackdatarecovery.com

[richidoo]

I once tried a bunch of the shareware products to recover photos from multisession CD-R that Roxio screwed up. I had no success, I think that was because there was nothing left to recover. Now I use RAID5.

I use a self booting diagnostic utility to find hardware problems. I could make an iso for you if you want to try it to see what's broken on the fried PC.

[Black Sand Cable]

I could make an iso for you if you want to try it to see what's broken on the fried PC.

Thanks Rich but it's not needed. I tested the motherboard and it's toast. The computer is an older one so I'm just going to strip what I need and toss the rest as it's not worth putting a new board in it.

[richidoo]

I have a couple maxed out ATX machines,  still working but slow and too old for newer Winders. I wondered whether a cheap new mobo would fit. How can I tell? Aren't they standardized?

[Black Sand Cable]

With parts being as cheap as they are now, just build a new one. Chances are the CPU you have now might not even fit on a newer board.

Going new you get the benefits of SATA drives, faster memory, SLI and a host of other things all of which add up to a better, faster computer.

[richidoo]

Yes, now I remember why I haven't done it. No point replacing just the mobo when everything else is obsolete too. Thanks John.

Tell your kids Santa is in Scotland right now.
http://noradsanta.org

[jmc207]

I've used both PC Inspector File Recovery and Recuva with moderate to quite good results. They are the top picks on Gizmo's Freeware page. These are good ones to start with.

http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-data-recovery-file-undelete-utility.htm

Good luck!

John