Need your recommendation

I am trying to fix my father's D: drive. He is running on an AMD 3200, with
a 13G c: drive and a 160G d: drive. He was using WordPerfect when it took
some error and crashed (don't have the error). Since that time, the D: has
been messed up. The PC recognizes the 160G, but Windows XP Pro keeps
saying it's not formatted and asking if we want to format it. I'm thinking that the NTFS directories are trashed, but the actual data files should still be there, but I don't know how to confirm that.

He has tried a couple of the recovery utilities from your Data Recovery page, such as the Stellar Phoenix for NTFS. One utility will allow him to recover a lot of files, but they are named "cluster001, cluster002" etc. I am more looking for something that can scan the disk, and rebuild the file structures, and allow him to get his files back, not just data clusters.

What utilities would you recommend for something like this?

THANK you!

 

To recover the drive go get Knoppix a bootable linux distro. http://www.knoppix.net/

Downolad the iso and burn it to a cd and then boot to that cd. Before you boot to it hang the affected hard drive and another one of equal or greater size. Then access the drives and copy everything over to the new drive.

I've done lots of drive recoverys and nothing compares to this method. Linux uses a different method to access hard drives and I'ts been my experience that Linux will access drives that Windows can not. Even with drive that has that horrible clicking when the drive can't find sector 0 as windows displays the splash screen Knoppix will access and recover data without any problem.