I hope somebody is able to give me some advice where to start to recover data from my HD.

The story so far:
The computer became suddenly extremely slow and did not react properly anymore. I cut the power. On switching on, it was not able to start from the HD.

I put the HD in a different computer and run Chkdsk. Chkdsk returned some error messages, and the HD was accesible again, however, most of my Directories (My Documents, etc.) were deleted.

However, if I go on properties of the disk, it shows me that 80% of the hard disk space is in use (although if I ad up the files which are left on the HD it comes to a mere 100MB). That means the data is still there I only cant see it.

Is there anyway to recover part of the data? e.g. I would really require my Outlook pst file etc.

If somebody has some tips please let me know, I would really appreciate this.

Thanks

Hi,

first to whoever reads: NEVER run checkdisk on a partition U have important data on! it can be the very harmful especially on FAT partitions.
The long version:
Now it is very important that you don't let any OS touch this partition, this can be done first creating a backup of the MBR itself, then changing the signature in the MBR ( 0x55 0xaa) to something else, or changing the partition type (from 0c->1c (FAT32), 07->17 (NTFS)). This latter will let some recovery progs see the partition correctly, I recommend GetDataBack.
(Hopefully your drive has a good writing channel, otherwise we mess up things )
But I would first create an image of the whole drive to a known good drive having at least the size of the bad drive (this is a bit-by-bit cloning).
then I would run the logical recovery SW on the clone and see if your files are OK.
This whole thing must be done by running your system from another HDD, (and not from the one U will clone to either, hehe) of course.


the short version: U plug the HDD into a computer having good OS and the logical recovery SW installed, and see if U get something. But I must tell this is very risky to both your data and the OS stability as well.

regards,
pepe

Pepe is right, Chkdsk is a very dangerous tool when critical data is required. Logical recovery software may bring something back for you, but i expect you may have lost all references to the filenames. If this is the case then your data can be recovered by filetype but it will be impossible to identify their original names and locations.

And again as pepe said above, cloning the disk is definately the first step!