Not Afraid lost more than some cleveage these past couple weeks, her hard drive failed. I've been trying to recover what I can the past couple days, some padders have alkready lent their support, but it seems I may need some more help.

Here's ther situation:
Old Hard Drive (60GB) crapped out - but not entirely, fooling me (and GD) into reinstalling windows to repair corrupted files. So yesterday, while loading back the programs to make it usefull, it crapped out again.

Fortunately, one of things I was able to do before it's demise was update her Norton Anti-virus, which I then ran overnight to check the disk to see if "foul play" somehow was responsible - Norton declared the disk clean

Unfortunately, the Windows XP installation disk failed to recognize anything on it. So I loaded windows onto and old drive (10GB) and then made the 60 GB drive a slave

Windows see's the 60GB drive, but only sees it as having 10MB of capacity - needless to say none of the files I had hoped to recover are included in that 10MBs

So now I;m running a file recovery program called "File Recovery" which isn't getting me any closer - and also shows me "Time Left" being some where between 7-8 million minutes (or 15 years) - I'm not really sure I want to run that program that long, but it continues to chug away.

So anyone experience in disk recovery that may have some suggestions for me in finding my lost files?

Both Not Afraid and I would certainly appreciate it.

I had massive hard drive failures (three of them) a couple years ago. After shopping around, I decided to use Drive Service Company (http://www.driveservice.com/). I found them to be quite honest and prompt. HD recovery ain't cheap, so make sure you really, really need those files if you go that route.

What brand of hard drive is it? Most hard drive manufacturers have free data recovery utilities that you can download. Generally, these build a boot disk that you use to launch a suite of utilities. Many are generally for provisioning the drive or copying data from old drives, but usually there are a few recovery utilities as well. I've had luck using these to restore corrupted drives before.

At one time, you would generally get a floppy disk of utilities in the package with the hard drive, but this is less common now, particularly since many newer PCs don't even have floppy drives. Usually, you now have to download the software and run an installation program that builds the boot disk. If you don't have a floppy drive, they generally only cost around $15-$20 now and it really is still worth having one.

-Jeff

If you PM Me I'll tell you where you can d/l a Great File Recovery Program that I use @ Work. it helped me Recover 4 GB's of data when one of the shops Deleted it by accident. if you want to look up the Company that makes it.
Goto
R-Studio (http://www.r-tt.com/)

Hope it Helps