Data Recovery

a friend of mine recently suffered a pretty fatal system crash on his laptop, and i advised him to boot from a windows CD and try a recovery, he didn't have a win CD with him so borrowed one and completly reinstalled winXP from that CD… he ended up with only half of his hard disk available and all of his files missing, i think he was using a FAT32 file system and the reinstall created an NTFS file system (not entirley sure how he managed this i wasn't there), i know his 20gig or so of missing files are still there, and can see where they are stored through disk inspection software….but try as i can a cannot get access to them, a lot of these files are important, we cannot afford any software to do this and are not sure how these files can be retreived in saftey without writing over anything else as it is a large chunk of his hard disk that needs recovering….. any advice?…

You can convert files one way one time (or you can and be safe about it) by using this command: convert e: /fs:ntfs /v That would convert volume e to NTFS for example. How ever, I am not sure just converting the files are going to help. Windows XP, during install, will create the file system as NTFS by default unless you choose FAT32. You might take the drive and put it in another box thats Fat32 to see if you can see the files.

Or you could try to hang the HDD as a slave in another PC and read the data like that.