@anyone,

I'm searching for a data recovery program to recover pictures (2,980 jpeg's),
a few word document files and some excel spreadsheets. The hard drive is report-
ing over 1,000 sectors errors and won't boot windows XP Home. I'm going to
re-install everything, but need to recover the files mentioned. I'm looking
for a program that's FREE, or open source or is low in cost. If I must
pay, it's got to be good. All suggestions welcomed.

-BP

Hi BP,

Have you tried to recover your drive with "Spinrite" http://www.grc.com

-kwag

@Kwag,

Kwag wrote:
I used HD Regenerator to repair as many sectors as possible, but the
Windows XP is still corrupted. Windows XP repair would not work.
My only hope is to re-install Windows XP. But their are files (jpegs,
doc, xls, etc.) I would like to try to recover. I need a program that
will run from a CD rom (a boot CD) and recover files.

http://www.runtime.org/peb.htm

What do you think of WinPE and BartPE to handle this problem


-BP

It might just be easier to just boot from a live Linux distro, such as Ubuntu, and it will automatically mount your XP partition as "Read-only".
Then you can insert a USB memory stick, or other device, and drag your jpegs from the file manager to the flash device.
Or even copy to another external USB hard drive.

Or how about "The ultimate boot CD". Have you tried that http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

-kwag

@Kwag,

I checked M$ Knowledge base and they recommended several solutions.
The only ones that seems close to solving my problems are:

1) Ontrack EasyRecovery - expensive, but very good

2) DOS Navigator - FREE and possibly a solution

http://www.ritlabs.com/dn

As long as the HD is available in System Setup, DOS Navigator can
view files no matter what file structure, or corrupt MBR, etc. If the
files are viewable DN can copy them to another partition or hard drive.

I'm testing this now and will let you know if it works. My first problem
is to create a bootable CD of DOS Naviagator.

-BP

Hi,

Your problem may be too severe for this to work, but when I had bad sectors on my HD and XP got corrupted, I managed to recover EVERYTHING using the method in this article:

http://www.digitalwebcast.com/articl....jsp?id=8658-0

I was truly amazed at how well this worked for me, maybe it can do the same for you?

Hope it helps.

- Icarus

@Icarus3000,

Thanks for your suggestion. I do have a severe problem and found a
solution using DOS Navigator. It worked fine for recovering 2,980 jpegs.
I moved these files to a secondary HD and backed this up to DVD as data.
Some pic's were corrupt, about 1%, but that's better than losing everything.

-BP