Zero Assumption Recovery. $49
Any other fully functional - and safe - free programs out there?
Tried to recover system from HP's recovery disc that they had me make. I know that it will totally reinstall, I've done it, but I tried to just recover. What a joke.
It kept telling me it couldn't find files. Well I know that! the only other option was to destroy data with a format and full install.
Downloaded ZAR Free trial allows 4 folders. Hah! the other 214 will have to wait.
It seemed quite professional, but with one horrible shortcoming. When it set about its task it did not show me which drive it was working on. This really gave me a case of tight te$ticals. I had highlighted H in a simple list of drives, but never did it respond to that command or show me where it was going. Anyway, it did a little de-frag kind of screen session and then lots of other things.
It then showed a tree of the sick drive, so I started to breath again.
I then copied the four folders to another drive. (to be safe, it was the partition of the sick drive which still works normally.) anyway, there they were.
So, it seems to have proved that the data is there, but if the backup DVDs don't show up, I'll have to buy the full works to get everything out, since one four-folder session took half an hour at least.