Data recovery software for NTFS5

[Nuclear Krusader]

Heya,

Anyone knows of good & reliable & effective data recovery package for Windows 7 Pro? Hard drive decided to die and the MFT got bollixed up. This drive contains my Documents folder so I really need to try to get the data back with the least amount of experimentation.

I don't care if the software is free or not, all I want is that it's reliable.

Thanks in advance for any useful input.

[birddog_61]

You can try Recuva, and if that doesn't work then try one of the tools in the ultimate boot cd like testdisk.
http://www.piriform.com/recuva
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

I have had good luck with recuva.

[K A Hall]

This doesn't come up as much as it used to but when it does I use GetDataBack. It's been years since I used it though.

[Nuclear Krusader]

Yeah, I have access to GetDataBack but the success rate has been quite low.

I'm not turning the machine on till I have something that will really work, so please keep the suggestions coming.

[glc]

GetDataBack is one of the best out there - the only software that may be any better would be Ontrack Easy Recovery.

To avoid overwrite issues, pull the drive and slave/USB it into another machine.

[Nuclear Krusader]

G, this is the data drive, not the OS drive. I can still boot into Windows just fine, it's just that Documents is not available, neither is the iTunes media folder and its contents. You know, this is funny: the system can still find or read the files from the Documents folder: the picture frame gadget can still show my pics that are contained in a subfolder in Documents, but when I try to copy stuff out using Windows Explorer the copy just goes nowhere; if I try to do it with the command line, same thing. Actually, typing DIR in the command line just returns 'File not found' for the contents of that folder.