Hello -
A friend of mine got a used external hard drive and hooked it up to my computer to delete the files off of it. But instead of deleting the files off of his drive, the ***** started deleting files off of MY external drive. I should have double-checked to make sure that he knew what he was doing BEFORE he started, but still....! Anyway, when I realized what he was doing I stopped him, but he had managed to delete about half of a 500GB (yes, GB) hard drive. Which totally sucks.

The only morsel of comfort that I have is the fact that it is a backup drive, not my OS hard drive, so nothing should have been overwritten and the chances of recovery should be good. However, I seem to be having a problem with the size of the drive. We're talking about probably over 200GB of data. I have tried two different recovery programs so far. The first one (Glary Utilities) froze after 2 days, and the next one (ZAR) gave me an access violation error after running for 16 hours. I'm not ready to give up because a lot of the stuff on it is irreplaceble (music composed by a friend who is dead now, etc). I don't have thousands of dollars to take it to a specialist, but I can pay some money for a program, if someone can recommend a good one that can handle a drive this large. Please, does anyone have any suggestions?

have you tried using undelete
http://www.active-undelete.com/

it's amazing at how much that even the cheapest data recovery software can recover. i've used the ultimate cheapest asnd most expensive and both worked surprosingly well. just dont save anything to that drive.

It looks promising - I'll try it. Thanks!

Let me know i may buy a copy for myself

Well, so far, so good. I downloaded the demo, which scans your drive and tells you what it finds, After you see the results then you can choose to buy the program and recover the files. It has already completed the scan and indicated that most if not all is recoverable, so I paid the $39.99 (not bad,especially for the volume of data!) and now I'm happily recovering away. It seems to be working beautifully, and it's much faster than I thought it would be, as well. I have yet to see if everything works okay and all that, but it's looking better all the time. I'll let you know what the final result is.