Its not often that I say nice things about M1cr050ft, but I must say that the NTFS filesystem & the filesystem checking program are really top notch.

I have now recovered data from 2 different systems, (both seemed unrecoverable, at first glance).

The latest one was a laptop drive (the laptop wouldn't boot at all, no safe mode, nothing)

After connecting it to my main system (and waiting 15 minutes for bartpe to boot… not a promising start), I managed to run chkdsk.

While chkdsk was running, the drive gave many strange clicking noises, & the chkdsk process to about 3 hours in total…

I was starting to think that the drive was probably beyond recovery.

But in the end, chkdsk completed. It said it found some unreadable sectors, & tried to recover data from them, as well as correcting other ntfs problems.

I restarted into windows again (so I could copy files to my own HDD), & windows took an extra 10 minutes to start… hmmm this drive is not happy.

But once windows had started, bingo, the drive was visible & I recovered almost the entire HDD contents (minus some still corrupted… or maybe newly corrupted, files).

I managed to burn the files to dvd (and en extra copy of the critical ones to a CD), and the customer is happy.

He hasn't fully paid me yet, so I'd better chase him up…