[postholsblues]

Hi,
I've just returned from my holiday, a very pleasant week in the Lake District, UK and to my horror, my slave hard disk is, according to XP, "...not formatted. Would you like to format it now?" It's a Maxtor 160gb Diamond Max Plus9 drive and it was working perfectly before I left. Nobody has touched the PC since I left, so the files must still be on there somewhere, but I don't know how to retrieve them. I've tried uninstalling/reinstalling the drive, but the situation remains the same. Can anyone offer me some advice on how to get my files back, please? The drive was about 3/4 full and some of the files are irreplaceable (I know I should have backed it up sooner, before someone tells me) so I'm desperate to retrieve the data and, if possible, save the drive in the process.
Many thanks in advance.

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You could try BartPe... http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ ... please read the documentation of the site.

This is an excellent data recovery tool that boots off a cd that you create. You will need a full version XP disc as the program needs the i386 folder to build the cd.

Once you burn the cd, you should be able to navigate your hard drives and move data between them.

I've used this on several computers, and saved data from unbootable hard drives. Very impressive stuff... and it's free!!!!

[makai]

You could try BartPe... http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ ... please read the documentation of the site.

This is an excellent data recovery tool that boots off a cd that you create. You will need a full version XP disc as the program needs the i386 folder to build the cd.

Once you burn the cd, you should be able to navigate your hard drives and move data between them.

I've used this on several computers, and saved data from unbootable hard drives. Very impressive stuff... and it's free!!!!

[bazcor]

or you could try getdataback http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm. you have to pay or it, but you can download it and see if it finds your files for nothing.