Disk recovery software - advice please

[stytagm]

Hi guys,

Can anyone reccomend some kind of disk doctor / file recovery software? Preferably free, but only because I'd prefer to download it tonight than buy it tomorrow.

The drive in question came out of my old box, so doesn't affect my new system, but there's loads of usefull old stuff on there (Mostly recorded telly programs) that I'd like to rescue. Windows just errors with "this drive is unavailable" or something similar. It used to be intermittent, but I havn't managed to get it to work for a couple of months now.

Can you get this sort of thing as a windows app, or are they all low level boot-disk style things? As my new system's working perfectly, I'd love to plug the old disk in, and just find and copy the filed to the new disk.

Sorry for treading over old ground, but all the google comes up with about a million options, most of which aren't really free (trial or crippleware).

Cheers - Andrew.

[stytagm]

OK, after some more searching I downloaded a free trial of something called "Get Data Back. The trail chugged away for about 30 mins and found pretty much all of my data (at least it found all of the data I care about). I can view it / open it, but as it's a free trial I can't actually copy the data off onto another hard disk.

But now I know the data is accesable, can anyone reccomend something free to extract it? Or just a good review site of free tools I could rummage through?

When I'm just googling for free recovery tools I tend to find stuff that either isn't free, or more often, isn't even a download site, just adverts.

Thanks in advance - Andrew.

[charleski]

I posted a link to a page that lists a lot of free tools here.

[this_is_gav]

Hexus did a review of the freeware FreeUndelete 2.0 and were pretty flattering about it. Used it myself very briefly to try and get some data off my server once, but the data had been destroyed. It did pick up what was there though, and allowed me to undelete it without issues.

http://lifestyle.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=6003 ifyou want to have a read up from the guys.