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You mean aside from EZ Recovery Professional? I worked with a sysadmin back in 2002 who said he paid $500 for
an Enterprise license.

Ontrack sells a whole range of file repair / recovery tools directly:

http://buyonline.ontrack.com/ecom/catalog.asp

[...continued from previous message. AG]
LSoft Technologies - Active@ Boot Disk, Active@ File Recovery and Active-Undelete
Micware Software - Encopy
Naltech - Multi Data Rescue (optical discs only?)
Nucleus Tecnologies - Kernel Recovery for FAT+NTFS
Ontrack Data Recovery - Easy Recovery Professional
Paragon Software Group - Paragon Rescue Kit
Partition Support - FindPart (and other utilities)
Phelps, Eric - Uncheck (for .CHK files)'
Piriform - Recuva
Phoenix Technologies Undelete+
ProSoft Engineering - Data Rescue PC
Quetek Consulting Corp. - File Scavenger
R-Tools Technology - R-Studio Data Recovery
Recover Data - Windows Data Recovery
Regall LLC (dba Object Rescue) - File Rescue and Data Rescue and Any Reader
Runtime Software - GetDataBack
Smart PC Solutions - Smart FAT Recovery
SoftLogica - Handy Recovery
Stellar Information Systems - Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery
SysTech Software - RECOVER Fixed/Floppy Disk FAT32 /16 /12 v3.0 Release 3 (floppy diskttes and hard disks <2GB)
TOKIWA - DataRecovery (erased files only?)
Zero Assumption Recovery - ZAR32 for Windows

Programs that I have personally used and had good experiences with are Acronis' Recovery Expert, DataRescue's Photo Rescue, Naltech's Data Rescue line and Runtime Software's GetDataBack line.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

[...continued from previous message. AG]
LSoft Technologies - Active@ Boot Disk, Active@ File Recovery and Active-Undelete
Micware Software - Encopy
Naltech - Multi Data Rescue (optical discs only?)
Nucleus Tecnologies - Kernel Recovery for FAT+NTFS
Ontrack Data Recovery - Easy Recovery Professional
Paragon Software Group - Paragon Rescue Kit
Partition Support - FindPart (and other utilities)
Phelps, Eric - Uncheck (for .CHK files)'
Piriform - Recuva
Phoenix Technologies Undelete+
ProSoft Engineering - Data Rescue PC
Quetek Consulting Corp. - File Scavenger
R-Tools Technology - R-Studio Data Recovery
Recover Data - Windows Data Recovery
Regall LLC (dba Object Rescue) - File Rescue and Data Rescue and Any Reader
Runtime Software - GetDataBack
Smart PC Solutions - Smart FAT Recovery
SoftLogica - Handy Recovery
Stellar Information Systems - Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery
SysTech Software - RECOVER Fixed/Floppy Disk FAT32 /16 /12 v3.0 Release 3 (floppy diskttes and hard disks <2GB)
TOKIWA - DataRecovery (erased files only?)
Zero Assumption Recovery - ZAR32 for Windows

Programs that I have personally used and had good experiences with are Acronis' Recovery Expert, DataRescue's Photo Rescue, Naltech's Data Rescue line and Runtime Software's GetDataBack line.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

I forgot 2006!

Also, here is Ontrack's official 2007 list. :)

2004.
2005.
Top 10 Ways To Lose Your Data due to the human factor.
How to smash a home computer.

I wonder if that Thailand guy should had used RAID setup, and not Raid on his HDD. [grin]

Why wouldn't you simply spend a couple grand on sending the drives to somebody like Ontrack? Several years ago one of the techs at a firm I worked for did the same thing to an accounting firms server. Our insurance paid for the Ontrack recovery. During the process I got a mini-tour of one of their facilities. These guys are seriously hard core about recovery. If it was just a simple format they could have probably handled it via a remote connection.

Ontrack Easy Recovery

alright, it's proprietary, so for us open source evangelists it is evil
but this data recovery tool does wonders...

http://www.ontrack.com/

This company can recovery almost anything, for a price, I suppose it depends on how important your data is. For me, a year ago my LaCie 320 GB Big Disk Extreme striped RAID array failed (one drive burned-out). Normally, if the drive was one single hard drive, it would have cost a very affordable $700-$800, however, the striped RAID array required disassembling two drives, removing the platters, reading them inside a clean-room environment, splicing back together my data, and placing it on another LaCie 500 GB Big Disk Extreme for $3500.00! Of course, my thesis was on this drive and I wasn't going to graduate without it! So, as mentioned before, data recovery depends on how important your data is. If your life or future career is on the drive, then the price of data recovery may be money well spent.

Original ontrack article - Top 10 List of Data Loss Disasters of 2006

His clothes were measured by firemen as carrying an electrical charge of 40,000 volts, the Reuters news agency quoted Mr Barton as saying

Wrong.

Many products exist to restore single Exchange mailboxes (Ontrack's Power Controls being one of them), or even specific content within a mailbox, such as an individual e-mail) without having to build a new Exch server. In fact. Power Controls only needs an Outlook client and its MAPI client installed on a separate workstation, and can restore to the same mailbox, a different or new mailbox, or export to something else, like a .PST file.

Couple that with high-end back-end storage like a NetApp SAN/iSAN or EMC equivalent that supports snapshots, and you can do this completely behind the scenes. People do it every day...

[Full disclosure: I work for Network Appliance, and we are a rebranded reseller of Ontrack Power Controls...]

There are places that will do it, for a (hefty) fee.

Example.

Oh, you can hire these guys or someone like them to use their scanning electron microscopes to map out the electrons. They can recover several layers of files, even after being deleted/overwritten/zeroed if not done thoroughly enough. Just hope you have over $100k per disk...

Recently a client had a drive fail in a RAID 5 configuration on a Dell server. You know the theory: pull the drive, replace it, watch RAID rebuild. However, that was not the situation. The RAID had quitely become corrupted. Subsequently I discovered from OnTrack that is not as uncommon as one might think. Running RAID 5 on our computers in the office ourselves, I became concerned about this and looked into it further. Luckily, we run Adaptec RAID controllers, Adaptec's RAID controllers (including Zero Channel) have the ability to verify the RAID integrity and repair it. I don't know which other controllers have this ability, but it can be a lifesaver. We run the utility once a month.

I built a brand new system and took that drive out and put it into another XP system as a slave....no problems at all. Then we had a power failure. I have 9 computers in my house, many with several drives, every system was fine, with the exception of that one drive. XP decided that this drive was no longer formatted.

I took my lumps from the wife and began to look into data recovery. I tried SalvageNTFS, ScroungeNTFS and a demo from OnTrack. I forget the actual status that each tool reported but suffice it to say that none of them were successful and I just moved on. I did keep the drive though. A few weeks ago I stuffed it into what is to be a new webserver and put in a knoppix live cd. *poof* got everything back...every photo was recovered.

Can't explain it, but I'm keeping a Knoppix CD in my box of tricks from now on.

I just used Ontrack EZ Recovery Pro to recover files off a 160 gig HD that was so hosed that nothing else would recognize it. Took a couple of hours to index it then I recovered to a mapped drive over the network. I've even used it to recover files off a HD that had been repartitioned and formatted. Great software available Here

The old Ontrack SystemSuite is the answer to those that hate Norton (as I do.) Full set of system utilities including hardware diags. It's now sold by VCOM

I recently used Ontrack Easy Recovery Pro to recover data from a hard disk in which the file system inforation was completely destroyed by corruption. Booting the disk as a slave in Windows gave me nothing more than a hardware ID in device manager. The disk wouldn't populate or even assign a drive letter. I had to do a raw bit-by-bit recovery which took over 12 hours, but I got every last piece of data off that disk(of course, I couldn't get directory info or original file names, but the data itself was intact).

I manage a second level support group at a fairly large company. We've found that On-Track's
Easy Recovery Professional is AWESOME. It fixes 200-some file extensions. All office suite files, zips, etc. We used it a lot on enormous PST files that would blow up at 2gb~. It fixes them in half the time of M$'s ScanPST tool.

Further, this product will do all sorts of HDD checks, and can does great file recovery. It's saved our asses a bunch of times. Just take a read.

It might seem kind-of expensive to someone on their own, but not to a mid-sized company. It's worth it's weight to me. They do have different licensing options and offer different/lighter versions of the product for less $$$.

The sucky thing about it's licensing scheme is that it's based on how many drives you run it on.

I've also heard that wininternals has an great product but if I remember correctly it was really expensive.

As others mentions, memtest86 and knoppix are invaluable tools.

Other tools you might be interested in;
Aida32 basically lists all of your devices, drivers, wmi software entries, pci devices, etc. for windows - needs an install, though.

OnTrack sell Easy Recovery Professional; the "file repair" options are pretty crappy, but for serious, near-forensic recovery on fscked up filesystems, ERP is a fine tool. Some of OnTrack's software (i.e. SMART tests, usually) may be licensed by the manufacturer of your harddrive, so check those pages out.

SiSoft Sandra is recommended a lot, but I don't find it offers a lot of diagnostics, though it is prone to crashing.

On windows, you might want to check out the Event Viewer, hidden in the Computer Management section of the (classic) Control Panel -- it will list all sorts of errors and notifications, kind of like /var/log/messages ;-)

That's true. This is the worst "article" I've seen on /. in a long time.

I love it how they refer to this "ACR" as a "leader in data recovery". No one ever heard of these bozos prior to getting exposure on /. today. The leader on the consumer side is OnTrack. These morons are selling software clones of which are probably available on sourceforge.

BTW - if you have *real* data recovery issues try Ontrack They can recover data from dead hard drives.

This wasn't an article, or review. I'm thinking it's 'looking for people to send me free stuff to review'-esque.

Perhaps he's going to use something like this or this

while this is probably a troll, I'll go ahead and reply with a useful suggestion. Easy Recovery Pro 6.0 by OnTrack technologies will recover most of the lost data from hard disks that are still recognized by the ide channel and somewhat readable. Seems like you can at least mount the drive, so by connecting the HDD into a Windows 2000/XP machine and running easy recovery should get most of your data back. Keep in mind, it'll take a while (last time I ran this on a virus-damaged 60GB hdd, it took about 6 hours), and recovered about 80% of the data.

We just got a laptop drive (and a bill) back from Ontrack after a VP lost his load on the road. It only takes one or two such lessons before getting such a spend approved...

This leads to a couple questions I do not personally know the answer to:
Is there a way to uninstall ActiveX controls?!?
Can I get a list of the ActiveX controls installed on my machine??!?

For my Windows box the best utility I've every used is OnTrack's SystemSuite. Included is a top rate anti-virus program (although I wish the damned thing was turned on by default) as well as a clutch of utilities that allow the management of cookies, temp files, registry repair / editing, viewing and unistalling activeX controls etc. etc. etc.

Check it out.

Or go here for the free version.

Semi-OT, does anyone know of a replacement file manager for Windows 98?

PowerDesk

So I brought the drive into work and ran Ontrack EasyRecovery Pro on it overnight. Somehow it was able to analyze, recover and copy every file on the drive, even those which were written on top of supposedly bad sectors. Unfortunately, EasyRecovery Pro isn't cheap ($500), but it works great.

I still can't get that DDS-2 drive (an ARCHIVE Python something-or-other) to work though, Win2k sees the drive but won't recognize the new tapes I'm feeding it.

sorry, bad link

Doing a DoD spec 7 pass wipe will make it difficult to retrieve data off a hard drive but definitely not impossible. there are many companies that do this as a service, as well as software and hardware you can buy to perform these sorts of tasks. just by using OnTrack's Tiramisu ( now called Easy Recovery ) software I have been able to retrieve data after ex-employees tried to "nuke" their systems completely. When you start looking at repetitive wipes, then you start needing more useful hardware tools, such as the forensic units available to police departments and the FBI, etc. These typically cost from 5000 to 15000 dollars.

The whole point of the story though is this- while it has always been policy to physically destroy drives that have ever come near classified data (as one would hope!) unclassified systems were just required to be wiped and then could be disposed with at will. someone changed this (don't know who or when...) but the DRMO has still been selling systems like hotcakes with fully functional HDD's so someone hasn't been doing their job, I suppose :)

I'm glad to see them change this back so these systems can be put to a better use for schools, poor folks, and the like. Considering the equipment turnover in some military and governmental facilities, some of those kids might really be lucking out!!!

I went to www.ontrack.com to see if, by chance, they had a FAQ like "Can I erase my data to the point that even you can't recover it ??". Didn't find it, nor did I look very hard, but did find this faq

If you want to use a data recovery company like that one, you had better have really valuable on your hard drive, or else it's not worth it.