My HD died yesterday and I can't boot to it. Disk read error or something like that on boot. However, BIOS can still see it, and (I'm now running off a new Win2K install on a second HD) I can see the Hard Drive in the Device Manager. I tried ERD commander (Winternals AdminPak 4.0) but it didnt recognize the volume. I tried ERD Commander from Winternals Adminpak 4.2 but I can't find a working crack. I used a really simple crack and was able to make a boot disk but the boot disk wants me to type in the license as well! Ugh.

I'm looking for a good free or cracked data recovery tool or a license.txt. If anyone knows of one, pleeeaaase respond. I had everything on that HD.  :'(

http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/knoppix/

Check your PM.

Encase can do that, but it's very very expensive and is designed for forensic work, not recovery.

Check your boot sector.  See:

https://davnit.net/bnet/vL/phpbbs/index.php?topic=8752.0

Running dskprobe on it sounds like a good idea. If dskprobe can't read it (as a physical disk), you're probably out of luck for all software based solutions.

Well... I tried EasyRecovery. Didn't work, got some error after 8 hours of scanning (Advanced Recovery). Got a general error when I tried Raw Data recovery. I tried replacing the Boot Sector and verified that it wrote data, but upon reboot it still says system disk error or something along those lines.

Hm. I will try raw data recovery again.

OK , EasyRecovery is a piece of crap. Wouldn't find anything, really.

I'm using a program now called "GetDataBack for NTFS." It has found 32,000+ files from my other HD and is still scanning for more. But finding anything at all is an improvement from the other two file recovery programs I've tried =)