Is hardly a description of the problem anyone can work with or base
I came home one day and the my WinXP home P4 2.4GHz 512MB RDRAM system
was frozen. All I could do is power cycle it.
When it came back up, GRUB (Linux Graphical Boot Loader) complained
about an invalid executable (error 12 maybe?) when trying to boot
WinXP Home. Linux, which was on a different drive, booted fine. The
bad disk is a Western Digital
WD2000JB special edition - 200GB, 8MB cache PATA.
I booted the XP Home CD into the recovery console and tried to chkdsk
(which immediately reported one or more unrecoverable problems), SYS,
FIXMBR, and maybe one other command containing the word BOOT. This may
have done more harm then good.
I dont remember if I originally formatted the drive as NTFS or FAT,
which makes thing smore complicated. Most data recovery tools have
reported the partition as FAT, but I dont know if it was originally
FAT, or whether I made it FAT with a recovery console tool.
Most utilites which think they can reads the drive just show a couple
hundred garbage-named directories and files with no recognizable
strings.
Only one utility - I forget which - EasyRecovery probably - was able
to recover 89 files, but they werent files I needed. I think it found
them in NTFS mode.
I have tried at least a half-dozen programs including:
Easy Recovery
Stellar Phoenix
ERD Commander
Partition-recovery
....and at least a couple others.
I am really surprised - this is a 3-month old drive - I had always
been told one would be amazed at how much data one can recover off a
crashed hard drive - but so far I am shocked at how little these tools
have been able to recover.
Any help or pointers to software or services appreciated.
