Stellar Phoenix 8

This utility recovers data from your hard disk, in case of a corrupt or damaged partition, boot sector or even accidental formatting. It supports FAT12, FAT16, FAT 32, and NTFAT file systems, can detect any IDE, EIDE, and SCSI hard disk, and supports Windows 98/Me/NT (FAT)/2000 (FAT). It keeps your damaged hard disk in a read-only state and automatically searches for lost data, recovering which it lets you select the files you want to copy to another drive or on to the same drive (if FAT is intact). You can also search for deleted files using wild cards.

To install, you use a bootable floppy to boot your machine and run Stellar from the accompanying floppy disk; or install and run it from another machine. But, once installed, you won’t be able to use the floppy again, as it moves the license from the floppy to your machine. So if your hard disk crashes, you won’t be able to use the software again.

We installed Stellar on a machine with two hard disks. We formatted the first drive and ran Stellar on it, and within a few minutes it was able to recover every piece of data, even the deleted files from the formatted hard disk. We then moved this data to a second hard disk, and faced no problems. We then copied a few files on to the formatted disk, deleted them and recovered them. The software was able to do so without any problems.

Sanjay Majumder at PCQ Labs