Saved by a penguin

I am a Windows SysAdmin at work. I work with Server 2008, Vista, SQL Server, Hyper-V, and many more Microsoft technologies. So, when the hard drive on my wife's XP machine died, I turned to a few tried and true pieces of software to get the job done:

Recuva - I've recovered all kinds of deleted files with this app before, but it let me down this time. It didn't even scan the disk, because Windows was reporting that the drives were unformatted, and were 0 bytes in size. I figured that this meant that the partition table was gone, so I looked for a utility that would recover the partition table.

TestDisk - this software claims to be able to recover a damaged partition, but I guess that wasn't my problem. This utility found no partitions, and no partition backups on the disk. When I tried to recover any files at all, it gave read errors on every sector of the disk. At this point, I thought it was a lost cause.

A colleague of mine suggested that I try ddrecover , a utility only available in Linux. I had nothing to lose, so I downloaded a Knoppix Live CD, and booted into a Linux OS without actually installing it...

So right now, I'm posting from an OS running ONLY off of a DVD, and in memory. This fancy OS is reading the screwed up drive with no problem at all, and I'm recovering all the data that we thought was lost. *whew* I guess Windows just got a bit confused about how to read the drive, and all it took was a different set of drivers to have a look at the filesystem. In any case, my wife will soon have her music collection and family photos all back.

38% done the recovery of the first partition... time for Castle Crashers.