First up, there is *no* budget on this one - I cant spend a penny. And certainly not the 6000 that profesional data recovery was costing the last time I checked.

The problem is simple - I have a corrupt FAT32 harddrive full of highly valuable and non-backed-up data (this system predates my employment here).

Scandisk throws up about a thousand errors, including a corrupt root directory, corrupt folders all over the place. File names are corrupted as well. Looking at what Im seeing, I think (hope) its the FAT table and not the actual files that are broken.

Question is, is there any free data recovery software that can recover data from damaged drives, without a file size limit like all the free ones Ive seen? I dont care what it runs on, I have a linux box here and most flavours of windows.

I think the closest I can get you to free is about $90.00 There's a very good utility made by a company in India... although I can't remember the name. I used it at home to recover 50GB of scanned slides from an NTFS drive when it got hosed by a bum memory stick (still have not figured that one out). Their free version will scan your drive and tell you if there's anything to recover before you pay. I'll post the name tonight.

http://www.stellarinfo.com/data-recovery.htm

Stellar Phoenix is the name of the product... They've got a FAT version in addition to their NTFS version.

[ 01-23-2003, 08:11 AM: Message edited by: Thoran ]

If you give an example of what sort of errors occur, it would be useful. This detail would help my friend write up a program that could help you. This is no garauntee(sp?), but it is worth a try. He could e-mail you the software after it is finished. I will have to stay in touch regularly to check my friend's progress. Up till then, best wishes!

This may be a long shot, but might Norton Utilities or a similar prog help you out. I am fairly sure that it has limited data recovery capabilities.

Cascading GPF failures. Not a good sign. Ill have to take the drive down to the office, see if I can find a more stable machine.

Ran OK under XP for me, even though several other products I'd tried had failed miserably (most just locked up when they tried to scan the drive). Not sure what OS you're using but I'd probably try 2000 over any other M$ OS for this kind of thing (IMO it's the most stable OS Billy has at this point)

There MUST be Linux programs out there that do this sort of thing, but I'm not sure even how to go about trying to find them.

Its running now, must have just been something with the first machine. Which is odd, cos its a fresh install. Win98, cos all the XP and NT machines are in use.

Not that basic search turned up anything, but advanced search hasnt finished yet. Next person in this place I catch not backing up (for 6 *years* as it turns out) is for it.

Same thing happened to me, quick scan didn't find anything but the sector scan found everything... took 7 hours though [img]smile.gif[/img] .