NTFS Recovery Software

I lost an NTFS volume because Windows is a pathetic excuse for an OS. Most likely the MFT got some garbage written to it (because Windows is a pathe...). The IT folks at work managed to restore 500 MB of the 90 GB on the drive. I figured I may as well try to do better.

Hard Drive Mechanic

This looks shady. The whole Higher Grounds Software site screams "if you know anything about computers you'll know we're not what you're looking for". I did not actually try the Mechanic, as there is no free trial and the epinions reviews indicated the company isn't as accomodating with their money-back guarantee as they claim. Boo, you.

DiskInternals NTFS Recovery 1.2

Sees the drive, but reports its size incorrectly (it's a 250 Gb monster). Windows 2000 reports the size properly (just doesn't see the file system), so it's not a BIOS problem. Finds 755 files and 53 folders. There were more than 20,000 files on the drive, so this isn't exactly a staggering victory. At least it's free. And doesn't do scary things like attempt to write to the busted drive without my asking it to.

PC INSPECTOR File Recovery

The web site should have clued me in. It's made by CONVAR, which is a data restore service. Hmm. How hard will they try to have me fix my own drive for free?

Not very hard.

The UI is maddeningly idiotic and my NTFS volume is reported as FAT32. Attempting to scan the volume for recoverable files leads to a memory exception. Oops.

Active@ File Recovery for Windows

This is the most serious looking of the four utilities tried to date. It also actually seems to take its scanning task seriously. It does under-report the size of my drive by a factor of two, but I'm not as picky as I once was. Sadly, when done with the scan it merely says "yeah, I found a partition -- please pay up and we'll recover it". No mention of how many files were found, etc. Sigh.