I had cause to require the services of a data recovery utility recently after having lost 2 x 100gb partitions on a SATA drive. My usual tool for this, Ontrack’s Easy Recovery Pro, does not sit well in Windows 7.  

So I decided to try Data Recovery Wizard from the Easeus stable. I have used other Easeus products with great success. Todo cloned an entire installation from a failing laptop drive to a new one, recovery partition intact and working, and Partition Master is way better than struggling with Windows ‘Shrink’.

This is the ‘welcome’ screen (to the right).  With only three options, it shouldn’t take long to find which is right for the job in hand. My drive was showing as ‘free space’, so I opted for ‘Complete Recovery’.

The next screen puts up a list of all drives and all partitions, and all you have to do is pick one. Mine was 100gb in size. It took a while to identify the two original partitions which formerly occupied the free space, and even longer to present the list of files..

My first shot was recovering music, photos, Word docs and scanned documents. Sure enough, they all appeared, all with original file names, and all able to preview. With all of them safely saved elsewhere, I started on the second partition, and again it took a while. This partition contained downloaded programs, utilities and other assorted stuff, all pretty much replaceable, which was a good thing because most of it was corrupted at the end of the process.

Would I recommend DRW? Absolutely yes. It does a sterling job on multimedia and graphics file types, and it saves the original file names. Trust me, some data recovery programs save a mind numbing list of sequential file names, none of which bear any relation to the file content. Renaming is a nightmare. DRW not only gets your files back, it saves hours of file previewing and typing.

For more, take a look here.. http://www.easeus.com/