Data Recovery

Vinnie · #1 1st Sep 05, 05:48 AM

What the best software to use for data recovery. I need to be able to boot from the cd, read the HD and recover data to a cd-rw.

freezer121 · #2 1st Sep 05, 09:31 AM

Bart_PE is well thought of. You need to make your own bootable CD on another machine.
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ is a good start point.

Depending on your file system, Knoppix can also work. http://www.knoppix.org/

An unusual way has worked for me on two dead drives. Wrap the drive in plastic, put it in the freezer for a couple of hours, then try it when it is really cold. It may work for long enough to get stuff off it. It worked for me.

Good luck.

Tomboy · #3 1st Sep 05, 05:53 PM

@Vinnie,

I have had very good success Winternals Disk Commander. It boots from a CD into a windows PE environment and searches for recoverable files on your hard drive. I have even recovered files off of a corrupted partition that did not show up as a drive letter under windows. You can save the files to another hard drive, a network drive, or a USB flash drive (I personally like this method and use a 1 GB Lexar drive). If you have more than 1 GB of files to recover, you can fill up your flash drive, dump the files to another computer, then go back and get some more. Good luck getting your files back.

Tomboy

Vinnie · #4 1st Sep 05, 11:46 PM

Thanks for the help, it's a friends computer that won't boot into XP. He has some pics and documents that he would like to get off before he wipes it out. I'll see what I can do.

freezer121 · #5 2nd Sep 05, 12:05 AM

In that case it may be easiest to take it from his case to yours and read it as a data disk, then to CD, DVD, etc.

Dudelive · #6 2nd Sep 05, 01:37 AM

As Freezer121 said if the type of files he needs to recover are that, then that would be the best way. Connect it as slave drive just long enough to get thew files off of it.

If you need it to boot the way freezer121 also will work for drives that are dying, but it will only work once or maybe twice if you are lucky and then for shorh periods.
Since it is XP you can try to repair the installation altyough if it was real important stuff I wanted, the slave choice would be best since it would lower the chance of file damage.
Good Luck

Thanks
Dudelive