File recovery NTFS - most files are binary zeros

[tathom]

Who provides an excellent service for recovering 100K+ of files - NTFS;

I clobbered a perfectly healthy drive by putting it in an enclosure that turned out to be a Maxstor Onetouch. 512GB partition is now 128GB. A local recovery service salvaged directories and 100K+ files, but most files contain binary 0's.

Help! Many irreplaceable jpegs, word docs. etc.

 

[tathom]

Found it! Hope this is your final answer tathom.

http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2007.07.20-HDD-Capacity-Restore-Tool/

Hey, this looks great! I found at least two similar stories of users regaining full capacity on drives whose setting had been changed by a Maxtor enclosure, such as OneTouch. Thanks for the heads-up.

To make the changes in a drive, it must be installed on a 32bit system.

At my house that means I'll have to get my original XP system running again. Gotta deal with a shaky C drive. I have a spare 500GB SATA drive. What the best way to clone an operational image of my 320GB Sata XP drive to the 500GB Sata drive?

 

[digitalprospecter]

Try out the free Easeus Disk Copy utility at:

http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/

 

[tathom]

Try out the free Easeus Disk Copy utility at:

http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/

Thanks again!

 

[digitalprospecter]

One other thing tathom.

If I've pointed you in the right direction and this solves your issue, could you please select the Best Answer button. That way other people having the same issue and searching the forum or Internet for an answer will know that they can find one on this thread because Best Answer selection marks the thread as solved!

Thanks.

 

[tathom]

Best answer selected by tathom.

 

[tathom]

Found it! Hope this is your final answer tathom.

http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2007.07.20-HDD-Capacity-Restore-Tool/

This small utility did just what was needed to change the capacity of the drive back to its original 512GB.

With that change, I had great success using the File Recovery software from http://r-studios.com/. This software ran for hours but recovered ~450GB of my original drive; I think I lost less than 5%. This software did much better than the recovery that was performed at the local tech shop.

Thanks, digitalprospec, for the your great advice. I back out of the doghouse 😛