Data Recovery Freeware

Recovery software will not help for mechanical or electrical hard drive failures. Only data recovery experts can retrieve back the information in mechanical or electrical hard drive failures. During hard drive failure it is strongly advicable to avoid furthure damaging data by install software on the damaged drive. Use the following data recovery freeware for simple recovering of deleted files before operating system overwrites the free space with data on top of it.

PhotoRec - (Small, fast, easy, no installation, but run within operating system)

PhotoRec can recover lost files include video, documents and archives from Hard Disks and CDRom and as well as lost pictures from digital camera memory. PhotoRec ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media's filesystem has been severely damaged or re-formatted. PhotoRec is a companion program to TestDisk, an app for recovering lost partitions on a wide variety of filesystems and making non-bootable disks bootable again. For more safety, PhotoRec uses read-only access to handle the drive or memory support you are about to recover lost data from.

Important: As soon as a file or picture is accidentally deleted, or missing, do NOT save any more pictures or files to that memory device or hard disk drive to prevent overwriting your lost data. Never write data to the same partition where the files are stored.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download

Recuva - (Small, fast, easy, no installation, but run within windows)

Developed by Piriform it runs under Microsoft Windows Vista, XP, 2003, 2000 and 98. Currently Windows 7 support is peliminary. Recuva can recover files that been deleted by the operating system and marked as free space. As with any other recovery program, this tool will salvage data that is deleted from recycling bin before the operating system writes on the free space. It can be used to recover data files from flash/USB drives, memory cards or MP3 players. Recuva supports FAT and NTFS file systems. To run this program, this program must be installed on a second working Windows system.

http://www.recuva.com/download

Restoration - (Small, fast, easy, no installation, but run within windows)

Use this program to undelete files from the recycle bin within windows operating system. When lauch, can scan for all files or limit results by search turm or extension. Also can wipe files beyond simple file recovery as a security or privacy cleanup application. This program does not require installation and can be run from a floppy disk. You can use it to recover data with FAT and NTFS file systems as well as fash memory cards.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/Restoration_d4474.html

File Recovery - (Small, fast, auto scan, but run in Windows system)

This program supports Fat and NTFS file systems. Can recover files with original data and time. It can also restore files to a network drive. It has the capability to recover files when header entry is not available. This program automatically at start up file FAT file systems even if the boot sector is damaged or erased. This program will automatically scan for file and makes file available in a "Deleted" folder in an Explorer style navigation interface. To run this program, this program must be installed on a second working Windows system.

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/welcome.htm

NTFS-reader - (Small, fast, easy, no installation, run in MS-DOS system)

This program can be run on by itself on a MS-DOS environment with long filenames support. It provides NTFS files systems support. This program allow to browse and recover all types of deleted files. You need to include this into a MS-DOS boot disk.

http://www.ntfs.com