[RamRom]

Originally Posted by henderson1977 GetDataBack was one of the better data recovery tools I tried, but none cam close to the powerful RawRecovery in Ontrack's EasyRecovery software. It scans the drive in RAW mode, so it ignores any (previous) operating system(s) and recovers data based on file extension (.doc, .xls, .exe, etc..). It does that by creating a signature for each file extension, which is made up of a Hexadecimal (usually the header) and the offset. It recovered upto 200 of the most popular file extensions which was great but, I need to recover the following files: .rar, .iso, .bin, .cue, etc... So I used WinHex (www.winhex.com) to create a signature for each file extension that I wanted to recover. I got far more data back using Ontrack EasyRecovery's RAWRecovery than all the other data recovery tools I tried (and I tried loads!). I find it frustrating that there appears to be no way to backup JUST the $MFT, afterall it's just a database like any other. I really didn't want to have to backup all my data onto another 200GB hard drive, but if there's NO way to backup the $MFT then I have no choice because I do not want to run the risk of this happening again. Granted, it may be impossible to back it up while Windows is running, but there must be a way to back it up at boot-time or as read-only perhaps. Any further suggestions please?

how do u use the winhex program to recover files?