Data recovery tools

Well, my previous attempt at disk maintenance ended poorly. That is to say, the clean and simple extension of the second partition turned out to be cleaner to expected - it cleaned out all partition info from the physical drive. A fresh OS reinstall later, I'm wondering if there's any tools you'd recommend to try and recover the data from the erased partition. It's been toward the back of the disk so there's a plausible chance most of it hasn't been overwritten yet, but given my critical miss with the first tool I've googled {eff you, partition wizard} I figured I'd better ask for previous experiences this time around.

An open letter to NCsoft

Other options include "NTFS Undelete," and "Recuva."

If you were running Mac, I would suggest DiskWarrior.


The most important, critical thing to do is to not write any files or alter your erased drive past what has occurred, until you have been able to act on it and retrieve/restore the data. e.g. Avoid partitioning or erasing any further, don't save any files to it in the interim, etc.

If you've re-installed an OS to your drive since you erased that partition, some data may be irrevocably lost. In general, once data has been "erased" it will still be there but is open to being written over at any time. If your mention of an OS reinstall was not on the erased partition, there may be hope, but I'm not sure yet how erased files on specific partitions plays into such a situation.

Again, it is best to avoid altering any data on that hard drive until a recovery effort can be made. Good luck.

I have had very good results recently at work from the full version of ZAR - Zero Assumption Recovery. Managed to get all of a user's recently worked on data files, and almost all of their archival files, off of a laptop hard drive trashed hard enough it was having problems even mounting (drive removed and mounted in an external case, attached to a PC with the recovery software). $50 for the software and an overnight run-time was a bargain compared to $400+ and a week+ turnaround for recovery services; and we got the files back with most of the directory structure intact which many recovery tools don't give you.