missing wav files

[thetourist]

hi - i am trying to restore data from a hard drive which appears as "unformatted" (and the wrong size) on windows xp pro. it is a sata drive (ntfs), and was the data drive in a 2 drive system. it was split up into 3 or 4 partitions. Windows was being reinstalled (repair) on the other drive when the damage occurred. The windows installation is still not right and eventually i will be reinstalling it.
i have tried out r-studio and stellar phoenix and have also tried booting from a knoppix live cd. in all three cases i can find the directory structure intact.
There are only 2 file types on the disk that i am concerned about, the problem is that one of them is not being found. I find the first type (.cpr) but the majority of the files (.wav) are not visible.
i am very new to this and these files are very important to me. Thanks for any help available.

ps the missing files MAY be of type (.w64) instead of (.wav) ;i am not 100% sure.

[Alexey V. Gubin]

Huh. You actually run a recovery with a ZAR trial, as outlined here (http://www.z-a-recovery.com/unformat-tutorial.htm), and the files are missing? In this case, the folder structure "near" where these files should be - does it look recognizeable or it is also garbled/missing?

[thetourist]

oops - sorry i was in a bit of a panic and didnt realise that this was a product specific forum; anyway i have tried trials of r-studio and stellar phoenix, but i will try a demo of zar next as well

thanks

[thetourist]

actually can i also ask this ?

generally speaking i am (a novice) and i am a bit scared of doing ANYTHING because i know if any of the recovery techniques i might use write anything at all to the disk then it could overwrite some of the data i want to restore, so please excuse the nervousness, do you have any advice, especially about this technique you have linked to - i mean for instance is it totally reversible if it doesn't work, or does the stuff it writes not affect any of the data on the disk, i mean only the partition table or something like that ?

also do you know how far on this technique can i go with the demo version; i mean will i know whether it would work before i purchased ?

[Alexey V. Gubin]

Neither ZAR, nor R-Studiuo do not write to the disk.
You can try one after another in any order. Even if both fail, the data is still in the same state, so you can try something different.

With the demo version, you can perform a filesystem reconstruction and recover the sample set of files (files in up to 4 different folders) to see if they came out good.