I made the mistake of trusting a program called Go Back which came with the Norton Suite. Had it told me it was compressing my drive, I would've stopped it... but it's too late for that.. the drive is having major problems now, it hasn't been bootable for some time, but any partitioning/formatting software can still see the amount of disk space used. This was my primary data drive, 120G with probably 80-100 Gigs of stuff I REALLY don't want to lose (which is why I never repartitioned it after almost a year).

Is there ANY software that can recover the data?

I'm pretty poor, so if there are options, the cheaper the better..

Thanks in advance!

If you bought this from Norton, ask them for help. Go to symantec.com

Well, I emailed Symantec, and they replied. My fears were correct. GoBack changes the partition type of the drive, to some format I've never heard of. There is a utility on the disk (which I do still have) that will undo the changes, supposedly reverting the drive back to NTFS or FAT32 (It's been so long, I don't remember). But now I've got a new problem. I have to run this utitity in MS-DOS mode (since the offending HDD has to be a solo drive), but my A: Drive is acting up now. My plan was, then, to make a bootable CD-ROM that would give me a DOS prompt. My understanding was that all you really NEED to get a real mode command prompt is command.com, io.sys, msdos.sys. I put those, plus the GB utility, plus some other DOS utilities (emm386.exe, fdisk, format, himem.sys), and an autoexec.bat file taken from Bootdisk.com's MODBOOT (which looks just fine to me) onto a CD-ROM, and made sure the CD-ROM was set to be the first place BIOS should look for an OS.

But I get nothing, it boots into windows. I figured I'm not going to swap the HDD's out until I see my bootdisk running with the known good HDD still in it.

Any suggestions for making an MS-DOS bootable CD-ROM?

What version of Windows?

Hi,
I am sure you have thought of this, but I will mention it anyway.
Have you considered taking your computer to a good computer repair store?
They could tell you the cost, upfront, of fixing it for you, or at least, getting your files off the hard drive, if possible.
Please think about doing this, at least find out the cost; you might be able to swing it!
Best of luck,
fredg

There is a utility called recover-my-files. I used it to recover a disk that was deemed unreadible by Windows. It has a format recovery option that can rebuild a partition. It was the only program that could get anything from the drive. Best of luck!

Hi,

I can say that Active@ Undelete tool works perfectly in such a situation. It has really great recover methods, really powerful, this utility was always able to restore my info.
http://www.active-undelete.com/

I suggest you use DataRecoveryWizard to recover you data.

http://www.easeus.com