recover partition after reinstall windows XP

Question

My OS was infected by trojan or virus and system files are corrupted. After tried to reinstall XP several time and failed, I took out the hard drive and prepare to back up files for a clean reinstall. Then found my data partition (D:) was empty except only a pagefile.sys, but looking into property, still can see 80% of disk space used (80GB).

It seems the index or something was corrupted during rebooting "chkdsk" when doing recovery installation. I found the disk label has been changed and chkdsk was reindexing that partition. But it hang somewhere so I forced reboot the machine. Could anyone help me out how to fix this?

PS: below is message from chkdsk: Stage(2 of 3) Correcting error in index $0 for files 25. Index verification completed. Error found. CHKDFK cannot continue in read-only mode.

Answer 1

http://www.piriform.com/recuva Is a free tool made by the makers of CCleaner.

It's worth a shot and certainly doesn't cost any money.

ddrescue is another very powerful option but it's more gear toward linux professionals. It works wonders.

Answer 2

WinHex or the 'lite' variant Davory would be my tool of choice, state-of-the-art forensic utilities.

you can run Davory over the drive and see if it is able to find your files. however, you will have to purchase a license in order to recover the files.

Note: When you select the drive to scan (F9), choose the physical disk rather than the logical drive.