Back in 2006 I had a hard disk crash and I used a program called Nucleus Kernel FAT + NTFS to recover files from the disk. Here's my review of this software:
17/04/06 - If your hard disk drive falls ill and your partitions are corrupted, you can use this utility to recover data files from those corrupted partitions. Just to be clear - there are two different types of data recovery program available on the market today; those that fix/repair corrupted partitions and those that recover data files. This one recovers data files! It does not fix/repair the corrupted partitions. Nucleus Kernel must be installed on a Windows XP computer. Normally you'd have two hard disks in your PC, a good one where Nucleus Kernel is installed and the bad disk. Run Nucleus Kernel and it will read (slowly - it can take many hours to scan a 160GB disk) the bad disk and give you a list of files it can recover. This list can be saved - this is a good idea as the scanning can take a long time. Saving the list of recoverable files means you can skip scanning the next time you use the software. I've used this software myself to recover data from a hard disk that went bad on my home PC. It works!!! I also used it to recover deleted files from a USB hard disk drive. The user interface is very easy to use which is surprising for this kind of software.
Nucleus Kernel is not free, you do have to pay for it. However, firstly you can download a free demo. This allows you to scan for recoverable files, but you can't recover any files. So it's useful just to see if it can help you before you spend your hard earned money. In any case, the cost is reasonable. When you buy the software, if you pay by credit card you can download it immediately.
Find out more here:
http://www.nucleustechnologies.com/FAT-NTFS-Data-Recovery.html
My rating: 8/10, recommended!
