Do It Yourself data recovery, file recovery, unformat, undelete, partition recovery and RAID 0 and RAID 5 recovery

There are several scenarios where any of our tools will be able to help you, but keep the following in mind: iUndelete only supports NTFS, DiskPatch does not salvage individual files but repairs disk structures, and iRecover is the most comprehensive of the three products: it does undelete, partition- and unformat recovery, can handle bad disks, and it supports the most common file systems. For iUndelete and iRecover you will need a spare disk to restore lost data to, for DiskPatch you do not unless you will be cloning a disk. If you are unable to boot your system, you will need an alternative system to create a boot disk. DiskPatch can be run from a boot diskette or boot CD/DVD; everything you need to create a bootable diskette or CD/DVD is included. iRecover can be run from a bootable Windows XP CD; use BartPE builder to create one. Read more about creating a Windows boot CD with BartPE here. Need more information? Read this FAQ item to help you pick your tool.
Goal/Task	Description	Solution(s)
Partition recovery	A partition was (accidentally) deleted or otherwise lost.	You can undelete the partition using DiskPatch OR you can salvage data from the deleted partition using iUndelete or iRecover.
Partition undelete	A partition was (accidentally) deleted or otherwise lost.	You can undelete the partition using DiskPatch. DiskPatch will scan your disk and re-enter the partition in the partition table.
Partition table repair	Partitions disappeared due to partition table damage.	DiskPatch can be used to scan your disk and rebuild a valid partition table. This is by far the most convenient way to recover data from this type of damage.
File undelete, unerase, deleted file recovery	A file was (accidentally) deleted while holding the SHIFT key, from the recycle bin or from a command prompt.	Both iUndelete and iRecover can retrieve deleted files. Note that iUndelete features a fast mode tailored to undelete, while iRecover needs to scan the entire disk.
Unformat recovery, file recovery, data recovery, file restore	Common symptoms are disks showing up as 'not formatted', 'unformatted' or 'RAW'. Windows may ask 'do you want to format it now'?	Use either iRecover or iUndelete to recover the data. Neither program cares how data was lost, they will just scan a disk and make recoverable data available to you.
Recover data from a disk with read errors, or bad sectors	Symptoms can vary; Windows being sluggish, or lock ups. A disk may be partially accessible, or not at all.	Both DiskPatch and iRecover are capable of dealing with 'bad' disks. DiskPatch clones bad disks. iRecover allows tuning of disk access parameters to adapt to bad disks, then read the data.
Recover images from a memory card, digital image rescue, photo recovery	Memory card was corrupted, formatted, or images were accidentally deleted.	iRecover offers 'image recovery mode'; tailored to retrieve lost images from memory cards. This mode is free to use!
Recover data from a broken RAID 0 array	Not all RAID 0 adapters are as robust as you'd like, RAID configuration data is easily lost.	Use iRecover to automatically retrieve RAID configuration data. iRecover will then allow you to salvage files as if you were recovering them from a normal disk.
Recover data from a broken RAID 5 array	Data recovery from a (degraded) RAID 5 array is complex. Often array parameters such as stripe size and rotation are unknown.	Use iRecover to automatically retrieve RAID configuration data. RAID 5 arrays can be processed even if a member is missing. iRecover is capable of processing hardware RAID and Microsoft Windows RAID (dynamic disks).