Bastards!!!

Win2K professional doesn’t support any fault tolerant disk schemes. I should be bloody able to mirror a disk on a workstation. How stupid.

R-Studio – Data Recovery software for Windows OS and Linux
Seems to share UI and some underlying code with the previous product (similar diag/error messages).

Update: After running through the scan, this one demostrated much much better results. I think I am going to buy it. The NTFS-only version is $49.95.

Now I have to install the new drive so I have a place to recover to.

Update2: New huge-ish (80GB, 1000x larger than the drive in the Mac I bought a decade ago) drive is installed. I should have my files recovered by now, but I am being slow and indirect.

I want to add right here that R-studio did a much better job of recovering the directory structure on my dry run than any of the others I tried. It actually shows the original directory structure more-or-less intact and with the original names. The others (if they got anything at all) have a bunch of generic directory names at the root of the hierarchy and nothing that resembles a deep folder like “Documents and Settings” in terms of its contents.

Data Recovery Software.File Recovery & Undelete Software.FAT.NTFS Recovery from Bitmart Inc.
Trying this one right now.

Only $49 for a version that handles NTFS and FAT and $29 for one that handles just NTFS. Tempting

Update: A bit twitchy about errors, I think after a while I think it gave up and acted like everything was fine. I ran it again and it seemed to run to completion, but the partitions it came up with for recovery made no sense. There were about 19 of them. None the right size, and most containing linux files which is odd, because if this drive ever had linux on it, it has long since been filled with NTFS files, almost to the brim, as well as defragged. It would be suprising if their were old traces of ext2fs around.

Active@ File Recovery Software. Undelete. Unerase. Unformat. NTFS FAT32.
The next recovery package I tried. This one doesn’t seem to work with the problem my drive has. I gave up and moved on.

Data Recovery Software – Zero Assumption Recovery
The next one I tried. This one took a little more effort to get through its scan. By default, it didn’t seem to skip forward after running into repeated read errors and I don’t think I could cancel the operation (I think I had to kill it with task manager). It also took significantly longer than GetDataBack to complete its scan (multiple hours vs 1).

Once done, the file selection UI was unweildy. There is an option to display individual files (essential, because sometimes directory names are lost/meaningless) but it only seemed to disply the files if the directory also included another directory.

I decided to keep looking, especially since this one is $99.

GetDataBack – Data Recovery Software for all Windows File Systems
I ran this one, and it seemed to do a pretty good job, near as I can tell. I had to tell it to skip all errors, and I had to put the drive on a separate IDE channel because it seemed to lock up when it hit bad sectors.

It let me open individual files, and most of the ones I want seem available and in good shape. To do bulk recovery, you have to pay, and this one is ~$129 because they seem to think NTFS users are flush and can afford to pay more. For that reason, I am looking for alternatives.