Files recovered

A few weeks ago my home computer crashed and crashed hard. It turns out that the motherboard, the main circuit board that connects all the other components, was defective. That was replaced, but my main hard-drive was scrambled during the crash. Physically the drive was fine – as least according to the amazing spin right. However, the crash had corrupted the master file table (MTR) and all hope and files looked lost.

There was little on the drive that I couldn’t recreate or restore from an old backup, but I didn’t particularly want to spend days re-ripping my mp3s and re-tagging my photos. So I tried a few of the most popular data recovery tools. It was strange, they could see the root directory system on a passive scan, but not much else. More in-depth scans of the corrupt disk started showing up files, but most of the packages made no attempt to reconstruct the original directory structure.

After several different attempts I came across GetBackData For NTFS from Runtime Software. Not only did it reconstruct by directories, but it allowed me to copy the salvaged files to a new disk. I’m not sure how different its scanning technology is, but the real difference that it made was in reconstructing the file system to give me a structure I knew and could easily navigate. I had trouble finding their software as Google is rather polluted with multiple data-recovery sites, so I’m putting up his blog post up in the hope that it points somebody else who needs them in the right direction.