WinXP Home Successful Data Recovery

I have been trying to find a way to recover some financial data on a hard drive that would not boot after post. Unfortunately, my attempts prior to finding this bbs, only made it worse, I basically corrupted the mbr and created a new fat partition while attempting a repair install.

After reading several threads, I bought a new hard drive so that I could slave the old one. Using FileRecovery Pro, I saw that my data was visible, but not wanting to pay 100.00 to purchase, I tried Active@Undelete demo. It said that my data was recoverable, however after buying the program it hit an error every time I tried. WinHex could see everything just fine, so I thought about using the hex editor in Active@Undelete to adjust areas as viewed through WinHex.

Since my time is limited, I thought I would do another query tonight and ran across a more recent post mentioning TestDisk. I thought I would give it a try and in a matter of minutes, my old hard drive was accessible. I only wish I had found that link before buying Active@Undelete. It seemed like a good program, but wouldn't work for me. I didn't need to read through all of TestDisk's supporting documentation, so I may have been able to recover the drive without installing it as a slave.

Now I have a second drive for regular backups. If I had only taken the time to back up to my laptop or CD, I wouldn't have had the frustration.

Hope this info helps someone else.

 

'Belt, suspenders and a piece of string' if you happen to be in the US.