Best Data Recovery Software

Had a hard drive crash and ran diagnostics that said the drive had unreadable sectors... sent out for a recovery analysis and they wanted $500 to pull the data... figured I'd try to use a software program myself to see if I can recover any data... saw one review that gave Migo Digital Rescue Premium the top honors but don't know anything about these applications... anyone out there have any experience with these utilities that could make a recommendation... thanks.

If your fat table is damaged, changing the fat table will most likely *COMPLETELY* destroy any data on the volume. Use the RDISK utility in WinNT or Win2K (Start / Run / Rdisk) if you can to create a backup of all NTFS boot records and fat tables, then boot with the installation CD and choose to repair the existing installation. It will ask you for your RDISK info, which you will have on the floppy you created. You should be able to recover most, if not all of your data, and you won't even have to reinstall the OS. If you cannot even get into the OS, try a program called NTFS4DOS from www.nttoolkit.com . Copy this to a bootable Dos or Win9x floppy, and you should be able to mount and read files from your NTFS volume(s). It is read only access, but you can copy files to another partition for retrieval later.

If that doesn't work try tiramisu for ntfs.

One of the best in the industry stellar phoenix hard drive recovery software.
I recommend because i had used it in past .

Cheers..