HDD Data Loss

So today i booted my PC and found that my secondary hard drive was no longer listed in my computer. I went to disk management and it said that the drive was offline. I wasn't able to bring the drive back online without doing a quick format. I managed to download a copy of Active @ Partition recovery and did a scan on that drive. It brought up all of the files that I wanted to get back only once i tried to do a recovery on the drive it gave me an error saying that the partition overlaps with another. I'm somewhat lost now in what to do, while im still looking for another program with similar functions I'm not sure what to look for. Any help in regards to this would be much appreciated.

Have you tried the fixmbr command out of the Recovery Console?

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/termsf/p/fixmbr.htm

Is that a legitimate, paid for, Active@ you used? The demo won't recover your drive, it just tells you what it can recover.

It sounds as if you have a corrupted MBR/Partition Table?

EDIT: http://antionline.com/showpost.php?p=925964&postcount=6

There are some links to file recovery tools there.

Another program which recovers the lost data and partition is Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Software. It recovers lost data and partition from FAT 16, FAT 32, NTFS & NTFS5 file system. I have used this utility and it has proved its worth by recovering almost 95% of my data. I think you can also give it a try as free demo version is available which can be downloaded from: http://www.stellarinfo.com/partition-recovery.htm
If the demo is able to show you the recovered data then get the full version to save it.
Best of Luck

There are some free tools at this site. From the recovery viewpoint the first one should get the disk back in order or at least recover the files. There is another program to recover pictures as well. ;)

http://www.pcinspector.de/download_all.htm?language=1

The Wolfman has found that runtime.org's GetDataBack always recoverd lost data.

http://runtime.org

Having said that, The Wolfman is not familiar with the tools Nihil and PCFreeman have suggested. Not only are they free, but they may work just as well. Give em' a try. But if they don't work, you may want to consider GetDataBack.

Hi Wolfie~,

Yes that one works just fine! I am cheap so I tend to recommend free stuff in the first instance, or if I know that commercial usage is not intended. :D