After loosing access to my data partition due to a major screw-up by Partition Magic, I started looking for ways to recover my data. The partition was still there, however it just wasn't recognized by Windows 2000.

Just to give a little background...this is a 60GB NTFS partition on a Western Digital 80GB drive. I am running Windows 2000 SP4.

So after trying many different programs, I was finally able to recover the ENTIRE partition with EasyRecovery Pro v6. However, my glee was short lived once I realized that over 60% of my data is now corrupt.

I have found that I can use EasyRecovery to fix the corruption affecting my Office documents and my Outlook .pst files, however I have 2 GB of images and 12 GB of MP3's that I would rather not lose, and which I cannot open.

The files are the exact same size as they were before the corruption occured, but they simply won't open properly. My jpeg's for example, will open, but there is no image. It just displays the little jpeg icon and that is it. Other images will display either the top half or the bottom half, but will not display in its entirety.

Does anyone have any idea of how I can correct this corruption? Since I can fix the corruption that occured to my Office and Outlook files, I assume these other files must be fixable as well, and I am simply lacking the correct program.

Any ideas that anyone has would be great.

Thanks,

Ancalagon

lot depends on exactly how Partition Magic screwed up. If your files are defintely corrupt, then it may not be possible to fix them, as I don't know of any tools that can do this.

I lost a partition several times before, using partition magic, and I never had any success with EasyRecovery. I more recently lost a partition, not due to partition magic this time, and successfully rescued all my data using GetDataBack for NTFS. Its the only software that has ever worked for me, but as I only used it once, I cannot say whether you would also find success using it.

I managed to rescue every single file without error using that software, but it isn't cheap. By the sounds of your issue, your data would appear to be damaged, though the cause may be more down to those files being fragmented when your partition went missing. If that is the case then GetDataBack can recover fragmented files in most cases.

EasyRecovery is not so good at recovering fragmented files, so that may be the cause of your problem. I'm only guessing though.

Also, while you appear to have managed to fix any corruption of your office files, you may actually have some corrupt data in those files. EasyRecovery has simply fixed any critical issue and allowed you access to those files. They will not be identical to their state before corruption occured.

No way to do it that I know of, you may be able to salvage portions of the corrupted data though. If there is a usable amount that is displayed when you open the file, you can copy it to another, or crop the images or whatever, but beyond that, you are lucky to have even got what you did. Data recovery is hit and miss to begin with, there are no guarrantees.

It's cool...

Thanks, guys, for your reply. You have just confirmed what I suspected all along. I guess I am gonna have to bite the bullet on this one...one kazaa lite download and 2 weeks later and I should be back to where I started before all this mess...

Thanks again for your quick replies. Much appreciated.


-- Ancalagon

one last question...

One thing, though, is bothering me...

Nic mentionned that the loss of data is probably due to fragmented files, and I agree...but what bothers me is that I was able to completely recover my .pst file for Outlook.

When I used EasyRecovery on the .pst it did recover maybe, maybe 20% of my emails, but then I tried Outlook's Scanpst.exe utility and it made the .pst completely readable. I didn't loose one single email.

So this makes me think that maybe the same is possible with a lot of my other files...anyway, if anyone has any thoughts lemme know.

Ancalagon

thx

thx

As a last resort you could try HDD Regenerator from http://www.dposoft.net/

I just loaded scavenger and used it to get all the info off of older HD
It even got files I deleted 6 months ago
I would say after trying about 6 diff types of data recovery software this works the best
be warned if you write to drive before you use this program you may not get all your files back .
heres waht happened to me I had OS melt dwn could not fix it
loaded OS on another hard drive
thinking I would get my old data later
when I hot pluged the old drive back in.
windows on boot prompted me it was going to fix the drive ,I just wasn't fast enough to get out from this
W2K deleted and rewrote the whole drive in about 20 sec's
not realy it just removed the fat files
I could not see the data scavenger saved the day 2 months of work was saved:grinthumb

re:

The recovery outlook express and pst recovery has prompted you a path of the Outlook Express files' storage. And now save the damaged dbx files in the safe folder, they can be useful.