Best way to recover 700+ GB drive?

[Spixe]

I have a 700+ GB drive that was full up to 600GB. With 100GB of free space, I tried doing a split partition (partition magic), and a power outage caused the partition get mess up mid split. Nothing showed up. 700GB of free space. I lost 600GB of valuable data. After stupidly trying some random partition tools in hopes to recover the partition table, undo the split, repairing the partition, doing a fix boot, etc, I think I ended up making the problem worse. It has had its partition info changed numerous times in numerous ways from numerous programs, but just in case, I never actually put any data on the drive in hopes not to overwrite it if it still existed. Right now it only shows up as an emptyn physical drive, unformatted.

After trying numerous programs, you're was the only one that actually found some data. But sadly, after about 120+ hours of searching (2 times, because i had to restart my computer after the first 100 hours) detecting over a million mpegs (I have NO IDEA why, as as far as I know there were no mpegs on the disk) it gave me an "out of memory" error. I have 4GB 1066mhz ram. After reading the forums, I decided to use the version latest version (as I was using version 2 before).

Like version 2 however, version 3 also has a lot of various search options. Since this is big drive with at least 600+GB of data on it that needs to be recovered (and dozens of thousands of files, mostly mp3, avi, pdf, and rar), I don't want to try every different combination of options and then wait a week for each option to finish, only to discover it didn't find what I'm looking for, and then having to do the same with the next option. It would take a month to find my files.

Can you kindly tell me what are the optimal search parameters for this situation?

To sum up:
File types mainly consist of; avi, mp3, rar, pdf. Others do exist however.
Partition data has been changed, moved, undeleted, and deleted several times in various combinations.
No "new data" has been written to the disk.
600GB+ of the 700GB is used, and if possible, needs to be recovered.

What I wish is that I could just restore the drive to before the split, and that I don't have to "recover" and copy all those files to a new harddrive. However, just in case I have to, I picked up a 1TB drive just for this occasion

Pleaaaaaaase help. Thanks!

[GDH]

Hi,

I expect you should still be able to recover your files.

It is really difficult to know exactly what has happened to your partitions, so you may have to experiment to see what you can get back.

Recover My Files v4, download from http://download.getdata.com/RecoverMyFiles-Setup.exe should find the old MFT records (called Filesystem Records in RMF v4).

Use this instructions here as a guide on what to do: Recover a Formatted Drive with Recover My Files v4

You can also use the OPTIONS > ADVANCED > PROMPT FOR START SECTOR to start the search at different locations on the disk - hunting for the Filesystem records.

If it turns out that your Filesystem records are completely screwed, then your only hope is to search for selected file types, and they will be returned without their original name or folder structure.

Good luck. Please let us know how it goes.

[Spixe]

Do you not support version 3 anymore? I already used the trial and so far so good. Just curious though.

Thanks for the answer. Can certain options degrade or alter the quality of the files recovered? For example, sector vs cluster searching, search till end of file, etc. I don't know the general rule for this sort of stuff, but one of the other recovery programs I used found some lost files avis, but after recovering them, they did not play. They all either wouldn't open, said "unable to render file" or other error messages, or just plain gave my comp the BSOD. Does that mean these files, though the program may say they are recoverable, are truly gone? Or are there certain options that has a better chance of recovering the file in-tact an uncorrupted?