Hi

The German computer magazine PC Welt reports in it's latest volume 09/04 about a free recovery tool called "Handy Recovery 1.0"

At www.handyrecovery.com you can download a data recovery tool which supports FAT 12, 16, 32 AND NTFS.

You can restore datas which had been deleted out of the recycle bin.

The details for Handy Recovery 1.0:


The details for Handy Recovery 2.0

Some more for you to consider

http://www.theabsolute.net/sware/dskinv.html

Disk Investigator™

Latest version
v1.31

- FREEWARE -
(Only 0.5 Mb)

- Discover all that is hidden on your hard disk -
- (for Win95, Win98, WinME, WinNT, Win2000, WinXP) -

What is Disk Investigator? - Disk Investigator helps you to discover all that is hidden on your computer hard disk. It can also help you to recover lost data. Display the true drive contents by bypassing the operating system and directly reading the raw drive sectors. View and search raw directories, files, clusters, and system sectors. Verify the effectiveness of file and disk wiping programs. Undelete previously deleted files.

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

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PC INSPECTOR™ File Recovery

is a data recovery program that supports the FAT 12/16/32 and NTFS file systems.

The current version 3.x replaces the previous version 2.x, which is now over 6 years old.

Here are some of the new features in PC INSPECTOR™ File Recovery 3.x

* Finds partitions automatically, even if the boot sector or FAT has been erased or damaged (does not work with the NTFS file system)

* Recovers files with the original time and date stamp

* Supports the saving of recovered files on network drives

* Recovers files, even when a header entry is no longer available. Competition products cannot recover such files. The "Special Recovery Function" supports the following disk formats:

ARJ AVI BMP CDR DOC DXF DBF XLS
EXE GIF HLP HTML HTM JPG LZH MID
MOV MP3 PDF PNG RTF TAR TIF WAV
ZIP

PC INSPECTOR™ File Recovery 3.x is so-called FREEWARE. This means that the software does not cost you a single penny.

All you have to do is go to our download area to download the latest version of PC INSPECTOR™ File Recovery 3.x.

PC INSPECTOR™ File Recovery 3.x cannot help if you have mechanical problems with the disk drive. If the hard disk is no longer recognised by the BIOS or is making unusual noises, you should contact the specialists, "CONVAR - The Recovery Team". They will certainly be able to help.

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http://www.roadkil.net/
Unstoppable Copier Recovers data from scratched or damaged disks including floppy, DVD, CD and hard disks

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http://ericphelps.com/uncheck/

Important: Save yourself some trouble. If you already know the extension of the file(s) you want to get back, just rename all your CHK files to the desired extension and see what works. The programs here are for when you have way too many CHK files to test or when you have way too many different file extensions you want to recover.

So what is a CHK file? Well, any time a program or Windows crashes, any files that were open are not closed properly. Part of closing is writing all the file location information in all the right places. Without this info, Windows can't find all the parts of the file. When SCANDISK or CHKDISK is run, all the parts are identified as "lost file fragments" and converted (if you want) into CHK files. Face it. Stuff crashes all the time. If you only run SCANDISK once a month, you get a month's worth of old crash junk. If you were working on (and lost) something important just before a crash, you might want to try to recover any data from any CHK files that exist. On the other hand, if you aren't in a state of panic over lost data, just delete any CHK files. A handy tip: Keep your disk defragmented. That way if you ever do lose it all, the lost file fragments will be more likely to be complete files.

Welcome Competition! A nice guy named Martin Kratz wrote a utility to compete with my UnCHK program. Amazingly, he sent me the source code. So... I compiled it and am offering it here for your consideration. Now you have two open-source CHK file recovery programs to choose from!

Both programs need the Visual Basic 5 runtime files, which come pre-installed on Windows 2000 and newer. If you don't have them, you can get them from Microsoft or Ziff-Davis. I'll do a side-by-side comparison:

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http://www.snapfiles.com/get/restoration.html

Restoration is an easy to use and straight forward tool to undelete files that were removed from the recycle bin or directly deleted from within Windows, and we were also able to recover photos from a Flash card that had been formatted. Upon start, you can scan for all files that may be recovered and also limit the results by entering a search term or extension. In addition, it also provides the option to wipe the found files beyond simple recovery. The program is small and standalone, it does not require installation and can also run from a Floppy disk. Restoration works with FAT and NTFS as well as digital cameras cards.


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Forgot this one

http://www.sofotex.com/SectorSpyXP/98-download_L7531.html

Lexun SectorSpyXP/98 Publisher's Description:
Examine all data on a hard drive or diskette, at the sector level! Use SectorSpyXP/98 forensically to find and retrieve incriminating evidence! Append text information evidence to a text file. SectorSpyXP/98 will not write any information to the media, avoiding contamination! You can override this with a key. Retrieve lost information, text that has been deleted and removed from the recycle bin, like e-mails, Word documents, notepad and WordPad documents, Excel spreadsheets, database text data, and any text data that has been written to the hard drive, and not yet overwritten by the operating system! Search for a list of keywords! Navigate the sectors with the mouse or keyboard! Supports the following file systems: FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, and diskettes. SectorSpyXP/98 is 100% free. Pass it around!

hi

hope this is not off topic, but how effective is say steganos shredder @ destroying disk data, will any of these utilities recover from them, i have tested floppys and it appears Stegganos can live up to their claims, but how effectice on an OS disk MFT , especially PX orP?

cheers

mesclun ;)

Hi mesclun.101

No your posting isn't off topic cause deleting data and data recovery are two parts which are close up together.

Deleting data a proper way means that a user has to make sure that he uses a good and effective method. Most offered programs do not use methods which had been developed by US-Military or -Government due to strikt restrictions.

IMHO private data should be removed by using a method of wiping a storage medium which writes a special patterns like 0 and 1 or other signs for many times.
I've tested this mentioned program (Handy Recovery) with a HDD being defragmentated and rewritten for many times. I could recover ~ 20% of the so called deleted datas. Trying the same with a HDD where the deleted data had been wiped of with writing different patterns for 15 times was little bit more difficult.

When you wanna be sure that all data of your storage devices will get removed totally you must put your devices in a magnetical field being stronger than 300 times of the Earth magnetic field... but I'm in doubt that a homeuser would have such equipment for home use ;)



Can you please explain what you're meaning with MFT, PX and P?

Greetz
B. Udo

Heya

VIA known as vendor of mainboard chipsets offers some programs for "free". "Free" means that VIA has developed this tools for their latest VIA-processor C5XL- or C5P-Nehemiah-core. This programs are working with other chipsets too but at reduced speed.

Attention: The option "Clear Partition Space" does not overwrite the unused diskspace, instead it overwrites the the choosen data partition . Please make sure to use the option "Clear Free Space" only !!!

Source:
PC-Welt Germany





More:
VIA Arena

http://www.data-recovery-software.net/Linux_Recovery.shtmlhttp://www.data-recovery-software.net/Linux_Recovery.shtml

Just found a new one FreeunDelete

Partition Table Doctor 3.0 -- partition recovery tool.
Partition Table Doctor is the only real partition recovery software
used to recover partition for hard disk when you experience a drive error
(other than hardware failure) this versatile tool automatically
checks and repairs the Master Boot Record, partition table, and
the boot sector of the partition with an error, to recover the
FAT16/FAT32/NTFS/NTFS5/EXT2/EXT3/SWAP partitions on
IDE/ATA/SATA/SCSI hard disk drives. It can create an emergency
floppy disk or a bootable CD for partition recovery even if your
operating system fails to boot. Partition Table Doctor manager
for MS-DOS, Freedos, Windows 95/98/Me, Windows NT 4.0,
Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003.

http://www.ptdd.com
http://www.ptdd.com/partition-recovery.htm
http://www.ptdd.com/recoverylostpartition.htm

Just wanted to ask a question. Do any of these tools recover .dbx files which are files in Outlook Express that a person might accidentally delete??

I know that there is a purchase program out there for Outlook Express recovery of .dbx files that I was looking at not long ago because of a big mistake that I made!

I hope that I have not posted this in the wrong spot or that I should have started a new thread.

Thankyou

Hi Georgie

Sure a recovery tool like that mentioned one does recover ALL kind of files, cause that's what it was made for. The only problem could be that the sectors of your HDD is in use of other files, depends how much this sectors had been "overwritten" with other information. All tools will give ya a feedback if files can get recovered successfully. To find this out you have to try a data recovery.

Regards
B. Udo

I would also add don't install these tools on the hdd your trying to recover from as you may overwrite the files your trying to recover. The best policy is remove the hdd and connect it to a different computer or boot using something like UltimateBootCD 4 windows which has most of the freeware tools listed here on it.

Again don't recover files to the drive/partition you are search save if you can to a external source whether usb hdd or flash drive or floppy.

Active@ undelete is also a good recovery tool. it can even boot itself from a disk
http://www.active-undelete.com/