I have a main C drive that got corrupt somehow. I threw a new drive in my system and reinstalled windows etc. I hooked the corrupt drive to another computer as a slave. It does not show up in My Computer, but shows up the bios fine. It shows up in Disk Manager as an Unallocated drive as well. I tried the data recovery software Ontrack Data Recovery, but after it recovers the files, it seems to freeze on "Building Tree...". I even left it on overnight and it still froze on building tree. Any suggestions on what to do, or other data recovery software I can buy? Thanks alot guys

First of all it would help to determine why the drive got corrupted. What size and interface is the drive and what service pack is integrated into the WinXP CD that you originally used to install XP? Knoppix may be of use to recoveer the files.

the drive is a 120gig NTFS western digital drive that is about 5 years old. I have no idea about what service pack was integrated into the Win XP disc. The drive has been in the machine for years and i dont remember what XP was installed on it. Im guessing one of the older versions, but everything was up to date.

mobkon What I was looking at was the possibility of the drive being larger than 127GB and WinXP CD to be original version. That compination on a compatible MBoard will allow you to install WinXP to the drive and will work fine for awile but will eventually end up corrupted. The cause is that XP original is not 48 bit LBA compatible. Being as this drive is only 120GB that is not your problem. Try Knoppix. Knoppix is a live CD/DVD version of linux. You may be able to recover files is the drive is functional and all that is wrong with the drive is a corrupted allocation table. BTW I was asking if the drive was IDE or SATA, not what file format was in use.

Ontrack's 'Easy Recovery Pro' is 'arguably' the best around. But here are a couple more that you might want to try: GetDataBack http://www.runtime.org/ Zero assumption Recovery http://www.z-a-recovery.com I've been told that the free version will let you recover four folders.

If the problem is only a bad partition table or the data in the (VBR) volume boot record then TESTDISK may work. There is a DOS, XP and Linux version of program. The program will check/rebuild the MPT (master partition table) and can check the VBR. Right before the problem , what did you do ? Could help determine the cause. You may have a bad hdd, use the utility from WD's site to test it.