Stellar Phoenix is the best I found (and I looked at a lot!)

Pros: I had an external hardrive that one dya just hung when I clicked on my picture folder. I could not access the folder via IE or MSDOS. If was messed up and it contained priceless files.

I don't understand the other person's poor rating. I tried 6-7 other programs and all but one could not recover my data or even read my drive. Only one program was able to recover some files but it renamed all of them! I found all the programs after spending days scouring Google searches and reading reviews. Yes I spent a lot of time because the data I wanted to recover was ALL of my kids baby pictures. I took the HD to a data recovery service bureau. Report was data could be recovered but would cost $900. I believe I had a corrupt partition table. CheckDisk did not work. Norton Disk Doctor did not work. Seasoned IT guys at work spent a few hours trying to ghost the drive on Linux and couldn't access the drive. My wife, an IT Admin was able to ghost the drive so I didn't have to put the original at risk.

Stellar Phoenix offers a FREE trial. I downloaded their free software and ran it. It took 12 hours to scan my 200 GB drive but came up with a report listing all the recoverable files. It took me a few weeks to finally buy the software because I couldn't find many online reviews by paying customers. Anyhow, I finally paid my $79 and a key was immediately emailed to me. I ran the recovery program and let it work for over 2 days. 98% of my files were recovered. About 2% were corrrupted beyond recovery (no fault of Stellar Phoenix, just Maxtor). Thanks Stellar Phoenix for making a product that works!

Cons: Don't know why there are not many reviews or user ratings online. Could use more detailed instructions but just let it run and it will do its thing. It tied up my machine for 2 days while it was working to recover my files. the long time may of had to do with the 200GB of data and it was saving to a USB2.0 external drive via a USB1.0 bus.

Posted: 13-Jul-2005 12:23:02 AM