I one of my harddrives got corrupted and CHKDSK won't even attempt to fix it. It just says: "The type of the file system is NTFS. Unable to determine volume version and state. CHKDSK aborted." I know the drive it physically OK, and its just the file system that's damaged. So anyone know of a good data recovery tool? I'd prefer a free one, though I wouldn't mind paying if its something that works really well. I was considering this one, http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm but Id like the opinion of someone who's had some experience with these things.

I'd look into burning a copy of the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows and seeing if any of its included utilities can help you. The last time something happened like this to me, all I really needed was to get the files off the drive, as the drive was pretty old and needed to be replaced anyway. Also, everytime Windows tried to read from the drive, the drive either froze or locked up somehow. For this I just used Knoppix, a linux variant that boots from a CD. It doesn't support writing to NFTS drives, but you can read from them. Knoppix was able to read my drive just fine without it locking up or freezing.

One of these should do the trick, or at least get you further toward fixing the problem. If nothing else, you can backup what you need before tinkering.

Alright thanks. I'll try those. Just one question, If Knoppix wont write to NTFS what am I suppose to do with the files once I read them. As fas I know windows wont read a EXT2 file system.

Knoppix has internet support, so you can transfer them to another computer on your LAN. If you have a secondary hard drive (or buy a new one to use as a replacement), you might also be able to use disk management utilities provided by the hardware manufacturer to do a direct partition copy from the old drive to the new drive. I did this with mine, and after it completed Windows was able to repair the file system on the new drive without locking up. I think I used a Western Digital utility that came with my new hard drive. You might also be able to write to a CD or DVD with Knoppix, but I've never tried it. This probably isn't that practical except for the most imperative documents.

AFAIK, the new Ubuntu 7.04 distro can write to NTFS properly. Might be worth looking into that.

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