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...to the former Drive Rescue Homepage

Drive Rescue - Undelete and data recovery tool discontinued on 07/30/2002   Another tool for memory card recovery: Digital Image Recovery...

Features

Supported file systems: FAT 12/16/32 (used by hard disks, disks, Smartmedia™, Compact Flash™, Memory Stick and others) and NTFS (including encryption and compression)
System requirements:

• Windows® 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000 or XP
  
• Second hard disk (or network drive) is recommended for recovery

Supported languages: English, German, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish

This program is no longer Freeware (there may exist older versions, but these contain errors and does not correspond to the newest developments).

 

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Latest features:

• Finds also drives with lost boot sectors and lost FATs (on FAT drives only)
• Recovers files with proper date/time
• Saves recoverd data also to a network drive.
• Recovery of lost files (files without reference from a directory, e.g. due to quick-format)
  The following file types are supported:
  ARJ, AVI, BMP, CDR, DOC, DXF, DBF, XLS, EXE, GIF, HLP, HTML, JPG, LZH, MID, MOV, (MP3), PDF, PNG, RTF, TAR, TIF, WAV, ZIP
  
• Searching the specific file deleted/lost
• Viewing the file deleted/lost

Voices

Some opinions about the program...

"Great little program! It allowed me to recover some files that I had accidently overwritten when repairing someone else's computer." (from Ontario, Canada)

"Rescued! Thank you for providing the program. It has helped me VERY MUCH - in fact from following situation: [...] I deleted the secured files on the hard disk. [...] with help of DriveRescue, I could rescue 95% of my secured files approximately at least! Thank you! The service is conclusive from my view and simple." (from Burscheid, Germany)

Frequently asked questions

How to use it... I'm trying Drive Rescue and I don't know how to go past the second dialogue box as you show in you help files? If your drives are right okay you don't have to search for them. So simply select your logical drive and then 'OK'. But if you want to search for your drive you can select the physical drive and then 'Find logical drives'. After some logical drives have been found you can cancel the search process if you want! Then the logical drives (including the new found ones) are shown again and you can select the right drive. NTFS... Does Drive Rescue support NTFS? The latest version of Drive Rescue can rescue from NTFS. But currently, there are only the 'undelete' and 'find lost drive' functions available. 'Find lost data' and NTFS raw data recovery will be supported in the near future. Corrupted files... Drive Rescue can not rescue some of RealPlayer music files ( .rm format) and some pictures ( .bitmap, .jpg format)...There is a message "Invalid file format". Does Drive Rescue rescue every kind of file format or just some? Drive Rescue can recover all files but they have to be stored as one large coherent block on the drive. Otherwise the recoverd file is garbage. No Help... The help function/file does not work. I tried to open the Rescue.chm file without success. I use WIN 95. The Help will is a HTML Help file. Under Win95 you've to download this support from Microsoft (HTML Help Support). Under W98/ME/NT2000/XP this is already included. Cannot save... I'm getting a warning message on some of the files I'm trying to save - it says "could not write to drive". This may occur because of the language character you are using - the next version 1.8 beta will fix this. Where to save... I don't have a second hard disk - I have the C drive, then a zip drive and CD-R drive (and an A). Can I copy the recovered files to a different drive or does it have to be a separate hard disk? Saving to any drive is possible! (since the files are saved by the help of the operating system - not with Drive Rescue routines). In addition to your local drives you can save to a network drive. Where to install... I lost all my precious files by reformatting my HDD (by mistake). Now I need to find the files. Does the rescue.zip needs to be installed in the 2nd hdd or the 1st one? And after installing how do I find how to proceed to find the files ? Just copy it to the drive where NO deleted / lost files are on. Then open the drive in Drive Rescue and select 'find lost data'. If data is found save it (select no FAT!) to another! drive (not the drive with the lost data). Fix partition table... I have undeleted my lost files to an another disk using your 'Drive Rescue' program ( a very cool product ), but I would like to restore my two partitions by fixing the partition table. Is this possible and how? Fixing the paritition table is not possible with Drive Rescue. What about the root directory... In the help/readme file you advise not to download files in the root of C:. Well, ashamed to say so, but that's exactly what I always did so far. I looked at this C: root several times, intending to clear it a bit because not just all of the downloaded main files are mentioned but also a lot of sub-files belonging to them and quite a lot of files which are not familiar to me. Lacking the skill I so far did not execute a clean-up. Please be so kind as give me a piece of advise to do the job. Recovering of data in the root directory on a quick-formatted drive is now possible with Drive Rescue! Since the root directory is cleared by a quick-format the program searches for special file type characterics. How to save to CDR... Is it possible to recover lost files to a CDR/RW Drive? At present, Drive Rescue will only recognize my main hard drive (C) and the floppy drive (A). Since it is advisable to recover files to a drive other than the one you are recovering them from, and due to the size limitations of the floppy drive, I would prefer to send the files to my CDRW drive (D). Is this possible with the current version? Drive Rescue is not a CDRW burning software! Anyway you can save to a CDRW if the software/ hardware supports packet recording. You have to install a UDF driver for your CDRW drive. Then you can save files like to a hard drive to the CDRW drive. CD Recovery... I wonder if Drive Rescue could help me recover information from a CD? Drive Rescue can NOT recover data from CD. Limited to special file types... Does Drive Rescue run in the background, monitoring your files as you create, save or delete them? In other words, will it only recover files that were lost after Drive Rescue was installed? The program does not monitor any files. It get the files by examining the file system (so called on-disk format of the files). There the files are marked with special attributes and names. Recovering is simular: the programs scans the hard disk and searches for a special pattern: the stamp of a directory ('.' or '..') and then assumes a lost directory. How to compare with others... How can I compare Drive Rescue with other recovery software? I'll describe a little experiment you can do yourself, that will show you how to compare with other recovery software: Format a floppy disk with the '/u' switch (format A:/u) or via Windows (do not select quick-format). WARNING: all files will be lost on this disk. Copy some files (JPEG, BMP, TIFF, RAR, ZIP, EXE, DXF, PDF, CDR, HTML or whatever you want) to this disk. Now do a "quick format" on the floppy (format A:/q). Use your favorite data recovery tool and see what it can recover from the floppy. Compare the results to what is recovered by Drive Rescue.   Error loading VXD... I get this error message everytime I try to start the software: Error loading "INT13EXT.VXD" Try to copy the .VXD file into your WINDOWS \ SYSTEM directory. The message will disappear. Formatted drive C: ... I accidentally formatted my drive C: !! So I put Drive Rescue on a floppy, but when I start the program from the floppy it says "This program must be run under Win32" You need a second hard drive with Windows 9X or higher installed to rescue your first hard disk.

Contact

For any question regarding former Drive Rescue, you can send me an EMAIL . Every kind of feedback is always appreciated (technical support for Drive Rescue is no longer guaranteed).

License

Drive Rescue, (C) 2002 by Alexander Grau - Paderborn - Germany, all rights reserved.

 

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