It’s never fun when a hard disk or other data media goes\r\nbad. Losing irreplaceable data can really ruin your day. Thankfully, a wide\r\nvariety of data recovery tools are available that may be able to help you get\r\nyour stuff back.
Note: This gallery is also available as an article.
I’ve used Data Rescue PC 3 on several occasions and had good luck with it. The download\r\nconsists of a CD/DVD image. The program requires you to burn this image to a blank\r\nCD or DVD and then boot the ailing PC from the removable media you’ve created. This\r\nis an important capability, since installing a data recovery utility onto the\r\ndisk that needs to be recovered risks data loss.
Data Rescue PC 3 has all the basics covered, and a Mac\r\nversion is also available. The software is designed to work even if a drive\r\ndoes not mount properly or if the drive has been corrupted due to hardware\r\nerrors or viruses. It can recover an entire drive or specific files. If you do\r\ndecide to perform a full drive recovery, you can opt to perform a block-by-block\r\ncopy of data from an old drive to a new drive.
Data Rescue PC 3 sells for $99.00, but a free trial is\r\navailable for download.
There is even a function for ripping audio files that may\r\nexist on a damaged CD.
The tool contains options for recovering pictures and\r\nmovies, songs and sounds, emails, and an entire PC.
Search\r\nand Recover sells for $39.95, but a free trial version is available for\r\ndownload.
The other nice capability is deep file type awareness. The\r\nsoftware knows the difference between various file types and can search for\r\nspecific types of data during a recovery.
Boomerang Data Recovery sells for $99.95, but a free trial\r\nversion is available for download.
Free Any Data Recovery is marketed as a free data recovery tool. In reality, it\r\nallows you to recover up to 500 MB of data, but you will have to upgrade to the\r\npaid version if you want to recover more data than that.
The tool itself uses a relatively simple interface and its\r\nbest feature is its ability to locate specific types of deleted files, such as\r\nMP3 files or Microsoft Word documents.
* 1988 - Started teaching myself about computers \ * 1992 - Mainframe programmer for an insurance company \ * 1993 - Network Administrator for a different insurance company \ * 1996 - Author for The Cobb Group \ * 1998 - Network Administrator for Fort Knox \ * 1999 - CIO for chain of hospitals \ * 2000 - Gave up the corporate rat race to work out of my home. I have been a full time technical author ever since. Visit my Web sites at http://www.brienposey.com and http://www.relevanttechnologies.com \
