Need file recovery program

I got myself in trouble when I tried to update my BIOS on my Asus A8N-SLI mobo. Somehow the procedure corrupted a lot of system files and I couldn't boot. It went into a looping mode. The recovery console on the Windows XP CD would not even recognize the hard drive anymore. I wanted to avoid re-formatting the 300gb Maxtor (thus losing data), so I purchased a separate hard drive (200gb Maxtor) and installed new system on that drive.

So now my computer is working fine again, but a lot of my data is residing on my old drive.

I tried ZAR (Zero Assumption Recovery) to recover the files and the program works great, it sees the files but you need to buy the $80 program to recover them. That's too much money to download a program I'll probably only use one time.

Does anyone know a good (maybe free, or less expensive) recovery program?

thanks

PC Inspector File Recovery is free, so is the Restoration program by Brian Kato.

acronis works like a charm

www.getdata.com

Thanks very much for the replies. Thankfully (due to a recent backup), I really only needed to recover a few hundred files, and the trial version of ZAR allowed me to do that.


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