A client’s Windows XP computer wouldn’t boot, even in Safe Mode. Pulling the hard disk out and mounting it externally on another Windows box, it appeared the partition information had been deleted. Thus began a journey of trying every tool I had to recover the partition.
Norton Disk Doctor? Total failure. Unable to recover anything, and it took forever to fail to work.
ARAX Data Recovery? It could find the partition, but failed at restoring it because if the non-existent other partition it insisted was there.
Spinrite? Hung at the bad sector and would not go past. I was shocked at this one, as it is a very low-level tool and has worked for me in the past.
HDD Regenerator? Now this worked at mapping the bad sectors and making the partition appear, but it was very limited in what it could do.
So what actually worked?
Testdisk! I used the version of this wonderful tool available on the Ultimate Boot CD. Bootedthe CD, launched TestDisk, it found the partition, recovered it. Then I used ARAX Data Recovery to recover the file structure to a good hard disk.
The lesson here is apparently that the free tools are much more powerful and effective than the commercial ones.