External hard drive recovery

[windowsuser]

Hi,

I need to recover a folder with all my pictures from my external hard drive (windows xp), western digital passport hard drive.

I accentually shift deleted it and it's the only copy I have.

I found this: external hard drive tool and downloaded it.

I installed it and scanned my external drive, it found my files but to fully recover them I need to pay about $40 - they don't mention the price on the site but I don't mind paying if it actually going to work.

I just wanted to check if MS offer a free data recovery tool instead of this paid one?

Hope someone can help.

Thanks

[Belatucadrus]

Piriform Recuva

PCInspector File recovery

Both well regarded free and should be worth a shot before paying for anything.

[Viresh]

Update, when I boot when the drive is connected it stops everything from loading, nothing loads! wtf. (this is an external drive) I plug it off and everything starts instantly. also it behaves really weird. It prevents storage manager from loading, I did a dirty trick and loaded the manager and then connected it, but I get the weirdest response please take a look. Disk 0 is my boot drive and Disk 2 is the external drive.

[bludgard]

1) ...when I boot when the drive is connected it stops everything from loading, nothing loads! wtf.

2) ...but I get the weirdest response please take a look.

1) Normal behaviour....

2) Take a look at what?

[npchekuri]

You can recover Corrupted or deleted data by using Remo Recover Windows - Basic Edition software.

This software can recover all deleted data from hard drive and external hard drive. It works almost on all versions of Windows computers. In all versions, data loss is common. Suppose you are using Windows XP and if you have deleted files from XP then you can recover deleted files easily using this software. To try out software Please download and install demo version of the remo-recover-windows.exe software in your system.