File recovery software. - Urgent

[richard]

One of my friends has just gone and formatted his external 500gig drive by accident and has lost all his music. He is a musician and all the work on there was his own and he has no other backups. The problem is that I no longer use Windows at home now having just moved over to Linux and now don't know what software to use use. In the past I would have used PC Inspector File Recovery. He has offered me quite a bit of money to recover these files and I would really like to do this for him so if anyone has suggestions then please let me know.

[mac_shinobi]

photo rec :

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

test disk :

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

the free country data recovery tools page :

http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilit...recovery.shtml

Just as an obvious side note create an image of the hard drive even though it is blank and then recover the data to another partition or hard drive.

the free country obviously has other links to other free utils for drive imaging and other stuff which will be handy.

Also let me know how you get on with it

[mark]

I've found test disk far superior to PC Instpector - I'd def give that a shot first.

[richard]

photo rec :

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

test disk :

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

the free country data recovery tools page :

http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilit...recovery.shtml

Just as an obvious side note create an image of the hard drive even though it is blank and then recover the data to another partition or hard drive.

the free country obviously has other links to other free utils for drive imaging and other stuff which will be handy.

Also let me know how you get on with it

Thanks for the links

I hadn't thought of making an image but as the drive is 500gig and was about 80% full that could be a bit difficult..

I've just tested Photo Rec but there is a slight problem in that it doesn't recover files with there own file name but creates a new one which could be a bit problematical.

[mac_shinobi]

presuming since you posted in the *nix Topic area that this is a unix formated drive of some description ?

Will have a look around later and see what else there is but would be handy to know what file system it should be using

[richard]

The drive is formatted FAT32 as my friends machine runs windows xp.

[Geoff]

Also have a look at 'magicresuce'.

http://jbj.rapanden.dk/magicrescue/

Works reasonably well for me on FAT32 formatted pen drives.