Data Recovery
 

I'm looking for opinions on Data Recovery, from damaged/corrupt hard disks.

On my own systems, I am pretty much "back-up happy", but my brother has recently lost all his data on one of his drives, he is running MS2k and the OS reports that the drive is not formated.

I tried a couple of old recovery applications I had, and they do manage to find the files on the drive, but I am a little reluctant to purchase the full versions of these programs as I know very little about them.

As such are there any applications out there that has been tried and tested and does not cost serious money?
All comments and opinions appreciated here...

Going forward, I plan to buy an IDE RAID controller and mirror his data over two drives.

Have you tried accessing it with a linux box? If it is usign NTFS then make sure you have ntfs support.

Sysinternals also have a good product called Remote Recover which has a limited trial edition:
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/fr...erecover.shtml

Last resort was to try connecting with one of my Linux boxes, will have to check for NTFS support though.

On the problem machine, it still boots and runs fine, as it was the 2nd drive that has the problems, basically what I wish to do is access the problem drive and copy as much as possible over to the working drive, which contains the OS etc.