file recovery

after a power flash today, my girlfriedns hard drive was pretty much wiped out.

Now that i have a few minuits, i would like ot ask for some help.

The bood record was destroyed, and the file table was too. I am unsure as to if it was running fat32 or NTFS, but for some reason im leaning towards fat32.

Anyways, Because of this i come here, and i find that there is no stickey for hard drive file recovery!

Any and all programs you have used or heard were good for this, freeware or not, i would like ot have the name of and a brief what you think of it...Ill try my best to pull it all together into a decent guide....as well as get her precious digital pictured back.

(oddly enough, a backup of said pictures was going to be sometime this week!)

Thanks ion advance, and i hope to get some great info.

I have an NTFS recovery utility that's always worked well

File Scavenger

All will handle various tasks and filesystems.

PC Inspector is freeware:

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

Useful for basic and noncomplex recovery. Runs within a Windows shell. Results can be somewhat intermittent, but the price is right.

R-Studio comes highly recommended:

http://www.data-recovery-software.net/

and the inevitable Ontrack:

http://www.ontrack.com/Homepage.aspx?id=3&pagename=Software

The second two are available in various pricing levels and have very powerful recovery routines and abilities. I know people who use both. I've used a variety of other utilities over the years. Most of the downloads for utilities are trials and will allow you to view data, but not recover till the SW is paid and regstered.

oh the joys of file recovery programs. file scavenger looks promising so far, but with a limit of 64Kb itsw hard to tell.

ill have to try the rest later when i have time...Any other suggestions?

you can try the software avaible in the www.recovermyfiles.com which seems to be more promising results. I've used R-studio and Ontrack also but so far recentey they didn't give me good results than the above mention software so visit it and try it out I'm sure you'll get much more result.