Ok back in the days of old up till windows 98, all you needed to know was -- "sys c:, fdisk /mbr, autoexec.bat, config.sys, a basic atapi driver for CDs, and Norton Undelete". With just that you could just about recover any disaster besides a broken head on a hard drive. If there were physically damaged bad sectors, it was still possible to recover most of the files and user created documents.


Alright, now FAT32 is gone and NTFS is king. Assuming the heads are not broken, and I have access to a 2nd PC (windows 7) to aid in recovery.

If an NTFS system crashes and the HDD is no longer bootable, and the 2nd computer can see the partition but cannot read anything on it "damaged partition, cannot be read" --- can someone tell me what tools I need to get my data back ----> Images, Videos, Music, Documents, and just user created files. After recovering data I just intend to trash (or reformat) the HDD reinstall the OS on it.

Hm, is the HDD NTFS too? There are tons of data programs, best to contact your HDD's maker and ask, it's pretty easy, hopefully you pick a WD drive, those are the easiest to get the data from.

Actually the current failed drive is a Western Digital. To answer your question, everything is NTFS.

bump

You can try using getdataback or recuva once you get the broken drive hooked up to your new computer. you could also try sector repair from DFT at the cost of losing some data.

I will google this up right away and read up. Thanks for the info..