Hard Drive Data Recovery

This is sort of a followup to another problem. However, the initial problem has been resolved. The guys at Powerquest directed me to an application which made the computer realize that these two messed up partitions of mine are still formatted with NTFS. So that made me happy. Temporarily. Until I realized there is still big, new trouble.

I have two NTFS partitions messed up now, both in somewhat different ways. Here is the situation:

My system partition on my 120 gigabyte drive. It is fine. It has always been. It is the avatar in this little story, just keeps on going, running Windows XP like a good little partition.

A second partition on the 120 gigabyte drive. After I changed its official format from PqRP (Powerquest Recoverable Partition) to NTFS, Windows XP did a consistency check on the drive. It "deleted orphaned index entries ", "recovered files" and "recovered orphan fragments ". About half of the 36 gigabytes I had on the hard drive were recovered.

The third partition, taking up an entire 80 gigabyte hard drive, did not undergo a consistency check right after being changed back to NTFS format. A consistency check now does nothing. The files are all there, just prodigously messed up. Some half-gigabyte files now have a size of zero. Certain mp3's, when played, now begin in the middle of the wrong song.

So, two seperate problems. Now I have some questions, which may range from ignorant to stupid to insightful. I have little experience in data recovery so I don't know.

It seems to me that there are some file indexing problems on the 80 gigabyte drive. So if I reformat it, what'll happen? If I try to undelete the files after reformatting, will they be undeleted as they should be, or with all the screwups still intact?

What are the chances that a data recovery utility can do anything more for me on the first messed up partition than CHKDSK did? I get the feeling that in the process of recovering what it did, CHKDSK ruined everything else. Is reformatting and undeleting an option?

Any answers would be immensely appreciated. I called for an estimate and sending these drives to a data recovery service would cost $4000-$14000, so a $50 undelete program is looking really good right now. As long as its not a lie. Norton Utilities comes with an "UnEraser" that cant unerase and Ontrack Fix-it Utilities comes with a trial version of their $500 data recovery software.

 

Maybe this canhelp

I use ontrack found here. http://www.ontrack.com/

 

I have looked at the OnTrack software, and am not using it right now for two reasons.

First, it costs $500 for the full version, which is a pretty hefty expense since this isnt any sort of business problem, I'm a poor home user =)

Second, I'm still not sure whether the software could help. I know for a fact that Executive Undelete 2.0 cannot help me at this point, but if it could do so after reformatting, I might try it.