The hard disk in computer stores your important and privacy data, and boots the Operating System. As you can see, hard disk has larger capacity and higher performance than most other storage devices, but it is so fragile that even slightly shock can lead data loss.
In daily life, you may encounter the disaster caused by incorrect manipulation or virus attack, which will let you be too deep for tears…
So, in order to avoid such things to happen (again), it is truly necessary to install at least one data recovery software solution stand by.
NOTICE: Before launching the processes of data recovery, you should protect the target partition and avoid ANY write operations on it, if it occurs in system partition, you must install the data recovery software to other places instead of default path.
- USEFUL FREEWARE
Do you remember Recuva in last post Top 3 Free Photo Recovery Software Programs for Digital Camera and Memory Card ? It is tiny and free, you can launch it on your thumb drive.
Download the portable version and extract the pack to a safe place, then launch the program Recuva.exe, click “Cancel” in “Wizard” window.
Select the target partition for data recovery, click “Scan”, wait for a while and you can see the results. The “Actions” tab in “Options” also provides functions to “deep scan” and “recover damaged or reformatted disks”.
Not only Recuva, but also Pandora Recovery provides functions for data recovery.
Pandora Recovery
Pandora Recovery will scan your hard drive and build an index of existing and deleted files and directories (folders) on any logical drive of your computer with supported file format. Once the scanning is complete you have full control over which files to recover and what destination to recover them to. It’s completely free.
If you deleted an important partition by mistake, you can refer to the article How to Restore missing partition, or try the free Paragon Rescue Kit Express provided by well-known Paragon Software Group, which delivers solutions for hard disk management, partitioning, drive backup.
- EXCELLENT SHAREWARE
While the utilities mentioned above are free, they have more or less limitations in functions. If you are not satisfied with the recovery quality, experiencing difficulties, or even want more powerful abilities for data recovery, you can try some shareware, and pay for it as you like.
R-Studio is a data recovery solution for recovery files from FAT12/16/32/exFAT, NTFS, NTFS5 (created or updated by Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008/Win7), HFS/HFS+ (Macintosh), Little and Big Endian variants of UFS1/UFS2 (FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD/Solaris) and Ext2/Ext3/Ext4 FS (Linux) partitions. It functions on local and network disks, even if such partitions are formatted, damaged or deleted. Flexible parameter settings give you absolute control over data recovery. In addition, R-Studio also includes an advanced RAID reconstruction module.
R-Studio
R-Studio has the most functions among all data recovery software mentioned here, but it is a little difficult to start using that powerful tool.
GetDataBack
GetDataBack will recover your data if the hard drive’s partition table, boot record, FAT/MFT or root directory are lost or damaged, data was lost due to a virus attack, the drive was formatted, fdisk has been run, a power failure has caused a system crash, files were lost due to a software failure, files were accidentally deleted. GetDataBack can even recover your data when the drive is no longer recognized by Windows. It can likewise be used even if all directory information – not just the root directory- is missing.
Recover My Files
Similar to GetDataBack, Recover My Files is fast and easy. No technical or data recovery software skills are required to undelete files. With a deleted file the data content of the file is rarely destroyed. Even if Windows file reference information has been destroyed, Recover My Files scans the data at a low level to locate “Lost Files” by their internal file structure.
Good luck with you 
R-Studio and GetDataBack are useful pieces of software. However, always determine the value of your data before attempting a DIY recovery. If you have data that is valuable trust the professionals. Most Data Recovery companies will offer a Free Quote for recovery and a No Data, No Charge policy.
Yes good collection of windows recovery tool.i would like to add Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery software in this list of wonderful software as this tool is really awesome and powerful in recovering deleted or corrupted windows hard drive…
i liked this article. I myself use Recuva and I can confirm that such software has saved me from “disaster” more than once.
Piriform (the guys that make Recuva) are doing a great job.
Free..And it Works!
Great Software
GetDataBack will recover your data if the hard drive’s partition table, boot record, FAT/MFT or root directory are lost or damaged, data was lost due to a virus attack,
R-Studio has the most functions among all data recovery software mentioned here, but it is a little difficult to start using that powerful tool.