Really Messed up HDD, Data Needs Saving

"...R-Studio - albeit incredibly powerful and a really good application - is only a demo for me. It's $80 for the full version..."
As powerful as R-Studio is, Network version or not network version, if the license covers more than one computer, -- that will be the best $80.00 you ever spent. And, I think you can even still get a free copy of R-Undelete, Recuva-type program on steroids. R-Undelete, if you do spend money on R-Studio, and you do get a free copy, can be installed -- after you have solved the immediate situation.

F22Simpilot mentioned a very powerful, geeky, program: TestDisk Step By Step - CGSecurity
It has great reviews.

There are free datarecovery programs available. Recuva is one. Or try active@ filerecovery. If it finds your data, the license is $29

As others have pointed out, there are many very good free and fee data recovery programs, many are cheaper than R-Studio and R-Undelete combined. Choose what you believe is best for you and your hardware, and let us know how things worked out.

userandaname said:

See if you could recover the files on your disk with this app: Complete Data Protection Solution - Veeam Availability Suite v11

It should be a free trial for 30 days so maybe you could recover your files this way!

Good luck!

That looks more like a backup software without a focus on recovery from messed up partitions. Are you sure it does work for such specific file recovery like this?

F22 Simpilot said:

Have you followed these specific instructions? TestDisk Step By Step - CGSecurity

There's also a help forum. cgsecurity.org - Index page

I have, in fact. The wiki has me quite confused near the end as I can't preview any files from the partitions that look familiar. As you can see in my previous post's screenshots, they show up as empty.

RolandJS said:

"...R-Studio - albeit incredibly powerful and a really good application - is only a demo for me. It's $80 for the full version..."
As powerful as R-Studio is, Network version or not network version, if the license covers more than one computer, -- that will be the best $80.00 you ever spent. And, I think you can even still get a free copy of R-Undelete, Recuva-type program on steroids. R-Undelete, if you do spend money on R-Studio, and you do get a free copy, can be installed -- after you have solved the immediate situation.

F22Simpilot mentioned a very powerful, geeky, program: TestDisk Step By Step - CGSecurity
It has great reviews.

Not to sound too tight on money, but I'd prefer to try my real best with TestDisk before spending a whole $80 on R-Studio. I don't know if it's worth it if TestDisk can do the same but I just need to learn...

SIW2 said:

There are free datarecovery programs available. Recuva is one. Or try active@ filerecovery. If it finds your data, the license is $29

I've used Recuva in the past (Quite long ago - in internet terms - sometime in 2016. I don't know if it's changed in a major way since), but I didn't like it because it didn't do well at organising results and with recovering file structures. Active@ File Recovery seems like I could look into it though...




I'm honestly in a state of confusion with so many of these different softwares on the market. (I also most likely am nervous about trusting near-random software to write to this disk, for fear of putting the files on it in danger)
Thank you all so far for the help, though!

R-Studio, especially the Network one, fully licensed, is used by many businesses, companies, agencies, etc. When it comes to data recovery, it is one of the finest, albeit with a learning curve. I was going to post a precis directory report of the R-Studio directories, my Directory Report utility needs to be reActivated, go figure.

Toydotgam said:

That looks more like a backup software without a focus on recovery from messed up partitions. Are you sure it does work for such specific file recovery like this?



I have, in fact. The wiki has me quite confused near the end as I can't preview any files from the partitions that look familiar. As you can see in my previous post's screenshots, they show up as empty.



Not to sound too tight on money, but I'd prefer to try my real best with TestDisk before spending a whole $80 on R-Studio. I don't know if it's worth it if TestDisk can do the same but I just need to learn...



I've used Recuva in the past (Quite long ago - in internet terms - sometime in 2016. I don't know if it's changed in a major way since), but I didn't like it because it didn't do well at organising results and with recovering file structures. Active@ File Recovery seems like I could look into it though...




I'm honestly in a state of confusion with so many of these different softwares on the market. (I also most likely am nervous about trusting near-random software to write to this disk, for fear of putting the files on it in danger)
Thank you all so far for the help, though!

Well I think it does have recovery tools built in from this screenshot:



But also you can use these other recovery tools from these other very professional people if you want to stick with something that you trust.

I don't mind.

SIW2 said:

There are free datarecovery programs available. Recuva is one. Or try active@ filerecovery. If it finds your data, the license is $29

RolandJS said:

"...R-Studio - albeit incredibly powerful and a really good application - is only a demo for me. It's $80 for the full version..."
As powerful as R-Studio is, Network version or not network version, if the license covers more than one computer, -- that will be the best $80.00 you ever spent. And, I think you can even still get a free copy of R-Undelete, Recuva-type program on steroids. R-Undelete, if you do spend money on R-Studio, and you do get a free copy, can be installed -- after you have solved the immediate situation.

F22Simpilot mentioned a very powerful, geeky, program: TestDisk Step By Step - CGSecurity
It has great reviews.

Hope we get this resolved soon!