Software to Recover Files from Hard Drive

[kirupa]

Hi everyone,
For some reason, an external hard drive is recognized in Device Manager, but it no longer shows up as a usable drive letter. Using the Windows disk management tools, my entire hard drive's space is showing up as unallocated.

Are there any software, free or otherwise, that can recover the data from the disk? I searched the web and found a lot of spammy results, and this thread (here (http://www.kirupa.com/forum/showthread.php?t=210450&highlight=software+data+recovery)) did not provide any names of software :)

Thanks!
Kirupa :inc:

[ramie]

File Scavenger (http://www.snapfiles.com/features/filescavenger-803-406688.php) works very well, it's not pretty or free but well worth it, you can try it for free, just can't recover.

[kirupa]

Thanks ramie. It was a backup drive, so there wasn't anything major that I needed. The program you recommended confirmed that ;)

[Maxtr0sity]

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1139&page=1

My 120GB external went out a long time ago, can't find the link now, but that should help you.

[teet]

Just for future reference:

http://www.ontrack.com/software/

There EasyRecovery Lite is probably the only viable option for most people...it's $90 compared to $1000+ for the professional version. I think these guys are one of the top data recovery companies.

Myself? I would rather spend $0.20 to burn a backup cd every now and then :P

-teet

[Pixelangry]

I shut mine off accidentally I while back and it wouldnt work, but when i plugged it into my mac it worked. got a mac available? :-P

[kirupa]

I have a monitor-less computer back home that is on 24/7 running nothing but Foldershare (http://www.foldershare.com) . It keeps a copy of files from several of my computers sync-ed up locally, and that works well also. I can always use the web-based interface to download the particular file I need, but of course it is more convenient to access a USB 2.0 drive's files as opposed to downloading them from your remote computer thousands of miles away!

[hl]

Does FolderShare take up a lot of bandwidth?Also, are you just sharing the C drive?
I've heard of easyrecovery lite and think it might be a good option for you. Bit pricy, but it works.

[theflash]

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

I think this is the one I had used some years back to recover my lost partitions. In my case too windows could not find any partition and showed my HDD unfomatted.