[rescue] a 'data' rescue

[Sridhar Ayengar]

Curtis H. Wilbar Jr. wrote:
> A coworker of mine has put me to the task of recovering data
> (personal, not company) from their laptop which has a failing hard
> drive.
> 
> I did clone it to an identical sized drive (using ghost with -ia -ib
>  -fro), then used norton disk doctor on the clone.  I got 5 G of
> stuff... but was looking for up to 6 times that.  One thing that seem
> to have not found the way back was the iTunes library he wanted.
> Oddly, the disk has almost no free space, but if you select all and
> look at the size, it's half of what you'd expect from drive
> properties.
> 
> In everyone's experience out there, what are the best tools (free, 
> shareware, and commercial) for recovering data from corrupted NTFS
> filesystems ?  How does diskeeper (a friend of mine has that on his
> system) compare to Disk Doctor.
> 
> Googling brings up page after page of people hawking shareware... 
> claiming to have done big reviews/etc, but you never see any
> commercial software on these pages....  so they seem to be sites to
> get people to buy the shareware. (so I don't trust the 'reviews').
> 
> Any advice is welcome.  I'd like to help him out on this by
> recovering as much as I possibly can.... I don't just wan to hand him
> the 5G I've recovered and say that's it... w/o trying some other
> tools as well.

IMHO, if the data is important enough to put this much effort into 
recovering, it's important enough to spend money on professional 
recovery.  They really do a good job.

Peace...  Sridhar