OUTSTANDING Windows File Recovery Utility

By Sellinae Date 2006-01-29 03:42 Edited 2006-01-29 03:45

I'm not normally one to sing praises about software, especially Windows software, but today I need to make an exception.

My neighbor lost 60GB of data due to an unfortunate accidental "quick format" of a 250GB external drive. I spent hours trying to find a partition recovery tool that 1) didn't cost any money, and 2) worked. No dice. One company's utility DID work (after 4 hours) but they wanted $159.00 to recover the data.

So I went searching for Mac utilities that would fix FAT partitions and stumbled upon a FREE WinXP utility called PC Inspector File Recovery. I read some reviews that stated it was indeed free so I downloaded it with much skepticism. 20 minutes later, it has found the physical and logical drive and (thus far) 720 directories. It says it still has 68 minutes to go, so it's quite slow. But if it's free, who can complain about the speed?

If you need this utility, it can be downloaded at http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm.

Once I finish, I'll post my final partition/data recovery results here.

By Sellinae Date 2006-01-29 05:10

Wow!

While not the most intuitive program, it does a GREAT job of recovering files. I mentioned in my first post that I spent 20 minutes finding 720 directories. That's because I was doing it wrong. Once I figured out what I was doing, it took about 2 minutes to find ALL the lost files and directories. I've already recovered all the lost data.

This is very rare: something free that works very well. If you have lost files or damaged partitions, this is the utility for you!