I've been providing free computer recovery services in exchange for a testimonial and recommendation. I have a client with a 500 GB hard drive that originally had an NTFS partition for about the first 370 GB and a Linux partition for the rest. He tried to install Ubuntu on the Linux partition. But for some reason, the installer reformatted the entire drive as ext4. He then reformatted the first 370 GB or so as NTFS to get the original formatting back so he could recover the Windows files from the original partition. However, the original Windows files did not appear, and Iolo Search and Recover couldn't find the files either. What do you suggest for recovering the files? PhotoRec will take 100 hours and does NOT recover filenames or the directory structure. I'll end up with numerous files with random names, and many of these files will be system files rather than personal files. What alternatives to PhotoRec do you suggest? I need something that's both faster AND that saves filenames and the directory structure. This is so much more difficult than recovering files from a bad Windows installation, which merely requires booting up a Linux live CD and copying the files to an external drive. This is so much more difficult than recovering files from a bad hard drive. I've found that if PhotoRec can read the hard drive (which it always has as long as the drive spins), Puppy Linux can do so as well. Thus, Puppy Linux is my favorite tool for copying files from a bad hard drive to a good drive. It takes a long time, but it works well and even preserves filenames and directories. -- Jason Hsu <jhsu802701 at jasonhsu.com>