Data recovery results

[Scott Ehrlich]

I recently asked this list for insight on data recovery methods for a 
family member's hard drive that was going bad.  I had fun and received a 
good education from the variety of answers.

Well, I ended up trying a Windows program - getdataback for NTFS - 
http://www.runtime.org

The free/demo version inspects the drive and shows the complete drive 
structure it was able to build.  If everything looks good, it then costs 
$80 to have it actually recover the data.  For an 80 GB drive on a 1 Ghz 
P3 w/384 MB RAM, the read-only inspection took about 6 hours.  It gives 
the option of skipping or re-trying bad sectors.  I elected to have it 
skip the bad sectors.  After the inspection, the directory structure 
looked really good, so I paid the $80 online and received the code to 
permit formal data extraction.  That took another several hours, but in 
the end, with some minor data loss, the recovery results were 
breathtaking.

To really test if the data content was intact, I called up some word 
documents and they came up fully intact.   Some jpg images were lost. 
Some avi files played back perfectly.   Looked to me like those files that 
could be fully recovered were done so intact.   I only took a random 
sampling for the test.

The recovered data took about 3.8 GB space, so I'm placing it on a DVD and 
will give it to them.

Thanks for all the great suggestions.   I'd never used or heard of this 
product before, but would very highly recommend it based on my results.

Scott

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