I have used R-Studio NTFS to recover lost, damaged, and deleted files on many troubleshooting calls. It has recovered files from from physically damaged hard drives that can’t even configure themselves as distinct drive letters in Windows. R-Studio NTFS can partially recover files from physically damaged hard drives. I did this one time with a badly damaged disk. Although the scan took a while because of all the bad disk sectors, it eventually recovered about 3,300 fully and partially complete files. If it is this effective with physically damaged disks, then imagine what it can do with a good disk!

R-Studio NTFS is very easy to use. I am currently using build 4.2, an older version. First you will be taken to the “Drive View” screen after double clicking on the program icon. Here you may right click on a drive letter, partition, or volume and then left click “Scan”. Next you will see a screen for scanning options. You may alter “Disk Size”, “Start”, “File System” and other parameters. I usually just go with the default values and then click the “Scan” button in the lower left hand corner of the current dialog screen.

Next a screen with a grid pattern will appear and the scan will commence using a graphical, color coded format for each square in the grid. The screen is titled “Scan Information”. Below the grid area, there is a legend that denotes what file and/or disk attribute each color represents. You may choose to wait for the scan to run its course, which may take a while depending on the disk size and the amount of data stored on the disk. Or you may left click the red “Stop” button on the toolbar. A prompt will appear to verify your decision to stop the scan. After the scan is completed or aborted, the left window pane will list the recovered groupings. Upon left double clicking one, you will be taken to a folder tree structure in the left window pane. You can left click one or more of these folders in the left window pane to recover data. Or you can highlight the folder in the left window pane so the files and subfolders under it will appear in the right window pane and you may left click one or more of those to recover the information.

Next left click the “Recover Marked” icon on the toolbar to begin recovery. A “Recover” dialog box will appear and here you will specify the drive letter and folder of the external media to recover your lost or damaged files to. Remember, when recovering files and folders you should always save the recovered files and folders to external media such as a flash drive or an external hard drive. This is so nothing on the source disk which is being recovered will be overwritten.

To learn more about R-Studio NTFS please visit their website at www (dot) r-studio (dot) com.

If R-Studio NTFS can’t recover what you are looking for, then you probably need to send your hard drive out to a professional data recovery company that has a clean room. They will dismantle the disk and use sophisticated methods to hopefully recover data from the disk platters. I have contacted several of these companies in my business dealings. Their prices for clean room recovery seem to range from the 300USD to 500USD range and up. It depends on what type of device or media and what processes they will need to use. Many of them won’t charge you a fee if they are unable to recover your data. Some won’t even charge a return shipping fee to send an unrecoverable hard drive back to you.

Please visit my website to learn more about my computer repair services.

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