Why it's best: Spinrite is the grand-daddy of Disk Recovery Tools. This tiny piece of software is OS independent and runs in its own FreeDOS environment, which grants it low-level access to the magnetic disk that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. It interacts directly with the system’s hardware instead of going through the Operating System or the BIOS. When it detects a damaged sector, it tries to read the sector up to 2000 times, in order to reverse-engineer, by comparing the successive results, the most probable value of each bit. Often this allows Spinrite to recover data from totally hopeless situations. It also employs other methods such as repositioning the drive’s read/write head and approaching the defective sector at various angles. The only disadvantage of Spinrite is that it doesn’t provide the option to store the recovered data on a different disk. This approach may prove to be unsuitable is the disk is completely damaged.
Spinrite is not just a Data Recovery tool. It comes with thorough diagnostic modes that can often predict disk failures well in advance. Spinrite has been around since 1988 and is still the best because it works!
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Why it's a best pick: Ontrack is well known for their data recovery solutions. EasyRecovery DataRecovery allows you to recover data from damaged disks as well as recover deleted data. DataRecovery can even recover data after the disk has been formatted. Additional options include the ability to repair and recover damaged zip archives. See more reviews, photos, prices, and specs
Why it's a best pick: TestDisk is free and open source software that’s worth trying out if you are not sure you want to pay for data recovery. TestDisk is intended for recovering lost partitions, fixing corrupted partition tables, recovering deleted files, make non-booting disks bootable again and more. TestDisk runs in DOS, Windows, UNIX and Mac. It supports almost all commonly (and some rarely used) file systems. The software itself is easy to use and is suitable even for novices. See more reviews, photos, prices, and specs
