My client has an external hard drive and it has 2 partitions, one is FAT32 and the other one is NTFS. My client pulled the USB plug before the drive was finished writing data. The NTFS partition was then corrupted. When plugging the hard drive to a computer, Windows could detect both partitions and assign a drive letter to them. However, the NTFS drive could not be opened to view its files. The size of the drive was reported as -1MB.

I tried to perform a scan disk on the corrupted drive but Windows reported an error saying that the drive could not be scanned. Then I tried to use the Pandora Recovery, which I have discussed about it here. However, because the drive was not accessible, Pandora Recovery was not able to scan it for deleted files.

GetDataBack

After doing some research on the Internet, I have came across with GetDataBack for NTFS from Runtime Software. It says it can

“recover your data if the hard drive’s partition table, boot record, FAT/MFT or root directory are lost or damaged, data was lost due to a virus attack, the drive was formatted, fdisk has been run, a power failure has caused a system crash, files were lost due to a software failure, files were accidentally deleted…”

I downloaded its demo and installed it. Then I used it to scan the damaged drive. It took a couple hours to scan but the result is brilliant. The lost files were found, so I paid $79 USD for the software to recover all the files for my client. After confirming with my client, most of the files were recovered successfully.

GetDataBack is quite easy to use. With just 3 steps, it will be able to recover your data. However, as you may have already noticed, the version I used is for NTFS only. If you are recovering a FAT drive, then you will have to purchase GetDataBack for FAT which is $69 USD. Maybe because of this specialization, the rate of successfully recovering data is higher than the competitors. If the data is critical, then it is worth to pay for it if the free software doesn’t work for you.