Bernie--
Check out the apps from Sysinternals and Wininternals (who now have gone
over to MSFT as of a couple weeks ago--the apps are tremendous quality but
not cheap).
www.sysinternals.com
CH
"Bernie" <bernie@nospam.org> wrote in message
news:uPHJPPatGHA.4748@TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...
>I have all the most important data backed up. But I have a huge number of
>downloads (utilities and lots of other stuff) that would take a long time
>to replace. It is worth it to me to spend some hours and even some money
>not to have to replace those things. So...
>
> I had four partitions; XP, Vista, Linux and a Linux swap. The XP partition
> is the important one.
>
> So I can see there are sites promising partition recovery software for a
> fee. I don't mind a smallish fee but I want to know what works and what
> doesn't first.
>
> So anyone out there good at data recovery?
>
> More data: I have another drive in the machine with a lot of free space
> but it is also my data drive. It is okay but doesn't have an O/S on it.
>
> There isn't a working O/S on the main drive and it is the main drive that
> I want to recover. So the ideal solution is something that can work from
> a bootable CD.