[BBLISA] Data recovery results

[Scott Ehrlich]

I recently asked this list for insight on data recovery methods for a family 
member's hard drive that was going bad.  I had fun and received a good 
education from the variety of answers.

Well, I ended up trying a Windows program - getdataback for NTFS - 
http://www.runtime.org

The free/demo version inspects the drive and shows the complete drive structure 
it was able to build.  If everything looks good, it then costs $80 to have it 
actually recover the data.  For an 80 GB drive on a 1 Ghz P3 w/384 MB RAM, the 
read-only inspection took about 6 hours.  It gives the option of skipping or 
re-trying bad sectors.  I elected to have it skip the bad sectors.  After the 
inspection, the directory structure looked really good, so I paid the $80 
online and received the code to permit formal data extraction.  That took 
another several hours, but in the end, with some minor data loss, the recovery 
results were breathtaking.

To really test if the data content was intact, I called up some word documents 
and they came up fully intact.   Some jpg images were lost. Some avi files 
played back perfectly.   Looked to me like those files that could be fully 
recovered were done so intact.   I only took a random sampling for the test.

The recovered data took about 3.8 GB space, so I'm placing it on a DVD and will 
give it to them.

Thanks for all the great suggestions.   I'd never used or heard of this product 
before, but would very highly recommend it based on my results.

Scott