Appropriate file recovery software

[Myau]

Could anyone please suggest the appropriate file recovery software for me? I have tried some applications which are not really doing the job properly.

I have a 250GB drive which use to be partitioned into 3 parts (~80GB each); now it has lost its original partitions, and only reads two partitions of ~128GB each.

I have not deleted any of my files or formatted the drive. They got turned into orphan files or something like that and they got lost, along with the original partitions.

So far, I have tried "Recover My Files", but it's recoverying files that use to belong to the drive's previous owner who formatted the drive. I don't care for those files. Also, the files are not recovered with their original names, and are recovered in small parts! i.e., 1 MP3 file of 30 Megs, will be recovered in tons of pieces of ~100 KB mp3 files!!

Can anyone suggest a more appropriate application that could fix/recover my original partitions, and my lost/orphaned files (which were not deleted) - AS they were named, and in their entirety??

Any help appreciated! Thanks so much!

 

[dazzer9535]

For file recovery http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm or http://www.pcinspector.de/smart_media_recovery/uk/welcome.htm and for partitions http://www.bootitng.com/bootitng.html or http://zeleps.com/ or http://www.ranish.com/part/

 

[Myau]

Also wondering, is it better to try to recover the files/data first, or to try to recover the partitions first??

thanx!

 

[dazzer9535]

Get the data first as Partition fiddling may result in lost files so back up first and save any important files.

 

[Myau]

Something really awful happened now..
One of the partitions on the messed up drive still had the original data on it and so I wanted to copy the files over to my good drive (using YCopy), in case anything happened to them during the file/partition recovery process. Once the copying finished, I started having major problems with my good drive; files/folders started becoming corrupt and I kept getting messages; particularly "the file or directory c:\$Mft is corrupt and unreadable..."

Now I'm backing up everything I can on DVD's. I'm afraid I may not be able to access the OS anymore after I shut down the computer.

I'm wondering how could this have happened? Does anyone have a clue?

thanks.