Can anyone recommend a good, free, data- recovery tool?

Check out System Rescue CD. You need to burn it to an iso and then boot into it, mount the backup and the disk you want to recover from, then go from there. Check out "adventurers system rescue CD guide"

>>57751146
Ill give that a try, thanks!

>>57751146
Mr certified pajeet, SysResCD also has TestDisk, nothing special.

Deleted data can't be ripped off as gzip backups if they don't exist in MFT as well, just in case you thought otherwise.

Don't misguide him.

>>57750915
OP, don't listen to him. There is no free tool as good as TestDisk.

Your best hope lies in the paid tool R-Studio (Network Edition if you have RAID drive) if you're willing to spend some money.

Also make sure there are drivers for your drive's filesystem (Ext2, ext3, HFS+ etc) you don't need drivers for FAT/16/32 or NTFS.

>>57751273
Im not opposed to spending money, but only if im certain to get my data back. It took me years to accumulate what I've downloaded. Its very important to me, but spending money on software that may not work is my last resort. I've tried test disk like 3 times, and it cant find more than one partition. The deep searches arent working.

>>57751293
I thought the drivers were installed because it worked fine when it was a usb drive. im on windows 10 64bit. The drive currently is in raw format, not sure how it got like that, i didnt change anything.

>>57751327
Get R-Studio. Any other paid tool is POS. Stellar Phoenix sometimes has chance of working but I'm telling you the sure shot tool. It's your last resort. I think $50 or 60?

Or maybe you have another chance... Getting your drive cloned by recovery professionals thru their drive cloning equipment. But that will cost way too much money if you're willing to pay for your data. Cost.. $500 I think

>>57751408
if all else fails, 60 bucks isnt that a pill to swallow to get my data back. Sucks how much a pain in the ass, dealing with raw data is. Thanks for the advice!

>>57751446
Never mind lost friend