Software for recovering files deleted from external disc

[flynempire]

Hello my brother-in-law had something really strange happen to his Western Digital Elements external drive. One day she shuts down then he reboots his XP Pro PC and once he got back into Windows he sees a blue screen with white letters saying delete "file" over and over.

He has a terabyte drive and was full up to 800 Gigabyte. He has lost all files and I cannot believe that happened. I am looking for the best Free file recovery tool out there. I still cannot believe this happened.

Thanks

[drtweak]

For free I would try Recuva http://www.piriform.com/recuva , if that doesn't work or if the drive is failing I would HIGHLY recommend GetDataBack NTFS http://www.runtime.o...htm it has never let me down, worth every penny.

:)

[FiB3R]

I've lost data more times than I care to mention :(

Can't remember which one of these save the day, sorry about that.

EasyRecovery Pro

File Recovery Pro

O&O RescueBox

Runtime GetDataBack

Personally I would recommend "try before you buy", then go pay the guys that actually helped you.

[flynempire]

Thanks for the quick replies. I will download and try. This is really strange the way it happened though.

[TEX4S]

Before you use some iffy freebie software - why not take the drive out of the casing - 99/100 external drives go bad because of the controller board - not the drive.

If the data is extremely important, non-replaceable - dont dick around with freebie, gimmicky "I hope it works" software - let the pros take care of it @ a forensic data recovery lab. But since you want free software - I assume its not important & you dont have $1000.

Just sayin -

If you want to get some awesome software - EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Pro - I have used it many times (made a few threads about it) and it is nothing short of life saving - I did a low-level format of the wrong HDD and wiped out my fiance's clinical notes for 1 semester of Medical school - I thought I was gonna puke when I saw what I did - that stuff was $90 and is still in my repertoire of wares.

But your problem does sound really strange - are you sure its a dead external ??

[Glassed Silver]

PhotoRescue Advanced.

Ok, price is an issue here...

Then the previous posts are good.

Note though, if some important stuff is left unrescued, give the trial of PRA a try.

Should there be any videos restored but corrupted, go for Grau HD Video Repair Utility.

Damn expensive maybe, but boy, it gets that job done!

Throw anything at it!

Glassed Silver:mac

[flynempire]

You guys are great! The drive is not dead, I see many folders for the XP version of System Restore. What was once over 800 gigabytes of files was reduced to 64 Gigabytes. I thought at first a virus but that would want to infect the C: \ drive first, this just happened on this external drive only.

To me it was not a virus. Perhaps something went corrupt but again I can access the drive and see folders and some files.

[cybertimber2008]

  On 18/03/2012 at 02:41, TEX4S said:

Before you use some iffy freebie software - why not take the drive out of the casing - 99/100 external drives go bad because of the controller board - not the drive.

It sounds like chkdisk ran and removed everything. Doesn't sound like a hardware failure.

But your point is valid! fly, use something like "clonezilla" to image the drive, then try to recover things from the image. You'll need another 1tb drive to do that however.

I also recommend Recuva as drtweak suggested.

[farmeunit]

Photorec and Recuva both work good for free. Easy Recovery Pro is great, but not cheap.

[Glassed Silver]

  On 18/03/2012 at 02:48, cybertimber2008 said:

It sounds like chkdisk ran and removed everything. Doesn't sound like a hardware failure.

But your point is valid! fly, use something like "clonezilla" to image the drive, then try to recover things from the image. You'll need another 1tb drive to do that however.

I also recommend Recuva as drtweak suggested.

I know I've worked very successfully with PR Advanced, but are there any charts for free, paid and free&paid combined comparisons on the success rate of recovery tools?

Glassed Silver:mac

[flynempire]

I am going to check out reviews and top ten reviews and see what they say. I forgot about this site and just remembered

[briangw]

  On 18/03/2012 at 02:22, drtweak said:

For free I would try Recuva http://www.piriform.com/recuva , if that doesn't work or if the drive is failing I would HIGHLY recommend GetDataBack NTFS http://www.runtime.o...htm it has never let me down, worth every penny.

:)

Seconded on GetDataBack. I accidently formatted my external WD drive back in the XP days when installing XP and it got EVERYTHING back. :yes:

[JJ_]

A warning that it's not free but it will sure save you days of trying crappy software.

I've had hands on experience recovering from a WD external hard drive recently. I tried about 10-15 freeware recovery apps all claiming to be the best and all were pretty much **** poor, too hit and miss for my liking. Recuva froze during deep scan 14 hours in. In the quick scan it only found a handful of files. A few others took 20 seconds to do a complete scan of the 500 gig drive :s The only luck I had was with R-Studio (http://www.data-recovery-software.net/) even although it didn't manage to find the one file I was looking for but did find stuff from a few formats back of the drive which I thought had long gone.

Btw I'm not linked to R-Studio in anyway, just passing on a few words of wisdom. 1 other recovery app I didn't try was GetDataBack which had good reviews so it might be worth giving a shot. Whatever you do, DO NOT recover files to the same drive. Writing more data to it is a recipe for disaster as writing any new files will overwrite your deleted stuff.