evening people. My slave hdd has totally screwed up.... I was unzipping a file, when the pc crashed around halfway through. Upon rebooting, the drive is inaccessable, and xp says it's corrupt. I have done the search here, and found a few answers to help me recover photograph I had stored on there. But I don't know if the drive is fat32 or ntfs, and i have a program for both (getdataback, if anyone can point me to a program that works better for me, i don't mind paying). Will I make things worse running the wrong version of getdataback? as i understand, this program never writes to the drive, so any recoverable data should be safe, and seeing i didn't delete, or format, the files shouldn't be unretrievable. Any help is much appreciated. Thank you.

I would take a guess here and say try getdataback for FAT first. I have used the program before myself, so I know it works. I agree; computing.net does need an edit button.

If GetDataBack doesn't work look here. http://www.kickstartnews.com/reviews/utilities/spinrite_v6.html http://computervitals.com/

You also may want to go to the Hard Drive Manufactures Web site and download a program for checking the Hard Drive's Health. Some times after you recover the information you need from the disk you can run their utility to low level format the disk and possible save it. It is worth a try, I have had success this way with an old HD.

yes, i'll check there site thanks. it's a 3 month old western digital, so i should have listened to suggestions and stayed clear of western. my own fault. thanks for your help, i'll try them all. thanks :o)