file recovery gone bad! please help.

[Myau]

my 250 gb drive crapped out and now i'm attempting to recover the data from it.

I have not deleted any of the files or formatted the drive. They got turned into orphan files or something like that and they got lost. only 1 of the 3 partitions on the drive is accessible. when i attempted to copy the files from that partition to another good drive, soon after the process, the good drive started crapping out! files and folders started becoming corrupt and I kept getting the message "the file or directory c:\$Mft is corrupt and unreadable..."

any idea how and why this has happened?

now i had to reformat the good drive, and i don't know if i can copy files from the bad drive to the good drive anymore in case this happens again.

also, could anyone please suggest the appropriate file recovery software for me? I have tried some applications which are not really doing the job properly.

so far, I have tried "Recover My Files", but it's recoverying files that use to belong to the drive's previous owner who formatted the drive. I don't care for those files. Also, the files are NOT recovered with their original names, and are recovered in small parts! i.e., 1 MP3 file of 30 Megs, will be recovered in tons of pieces of ~100 KB mp3 files!!

can anyone suggest a more appropriate application that can recover the lost/orphaned files (which were not deleted) - AS they were named, and in their entirety??

any help appreciated.

 

[4Ryan6]

The following is assuming since you're able to post here you have access to a useable machine that you can create a bootable floppy disk on.

The first thing you should do is scan your HDD for virus's it sounds like your HDD may be infected, the best way to do that from where you're at in your descriptions of whats happening is to use a Virus scanning program that will run from DOS mode.

Even if you're running WinXp or Win2k with the NTFS file system F-Prot DOS Boot will work for you, download F-Prot extract the downloaded file with its self extractor to a floppy disk.

Set your M/Bs CMOS to boot from the floppy drive, and run F-Prot and let it scan your machine, if it finds virus's give it permission to get rid of them.


Once you're sure your machine is virus free download and install PC Inspector on the good HDD and scan the bad HDD to recover the files you need.