I need your drives

 Hello!

Do you have otherwise working NTFS drives that have lost data on them, but don't want to pay for software or data recovery services?  Are you tired of "free" NTFS recovery software that turns out to only be free to download, or has arbitrary limits on how many files it will recover, how large those files can be, how large a drive it will work on, et cetera?  I was in the same situation a few years back.  But I am a coder.  And a video producer, so my files and drives were way over all arbitrary limits.  So I  wrote a tool that got my data back, but I only had a couple bad drives to test it on.   I'd like to share this free NTFS recovery tool with the world, but I'm not confident my code will just work on any bad NTFS drive.  Specifically, the drives I had problems with were temporarily hooked up to a Linux machine and somehow all the files disappeared.  I was pretty sure they were all still there, but something was broken about the file system.  I never figured out what broke, but I was able to write a program that found all the files on the drives and recovered them!  But I do not know how well my program will work for drives that lost data for other reasons.  So, I need to test it further before I release it (which I intend to do for free).  In the meantime, if you're looking for free NTFS file recovery, I'm your guy.  Send me your drives (or images thereof) and I'll test out my code on them, send you the results, and if that's not the files you were looking for, I'll see if I can find them by hand and update my program to find them automatically.  Or maybe it will just work!  Wouldn't that be nice?

And before you ask, no I will not post the code for you to mess with yourself, not yet.  If you're a competent enough coder, you will probably end up with better code by writing a similar program yourself.  I found this website particularly useful:

NTFS Documentation - Home

At the moment my code is not particularly readable nor well-commented.  I don't find comments useful myself.  The more code I can see on the screen at once, the better I'm able to understand what said code is doing, and comments take up valuable screen real estate.  I find making code more readable to others makes it less readable to me.  So I'm waiting until the code is ready to release before I make it more readable.  Also there is currently just a command-line interface.  And the directory structure is not restored, yet.  And it only works on images of partitions, not of full drives.  And a dozen other ands.  Not that any one of these things would be a deal-breaker, but put them all together and it's more than I want to have to answer for.

Or perhaps you are aware of a NTFS Recovery software that is at a more advanced stage of development and also free.  This would be a great place to post about it, so others seeking free NTFS file recovery solutions can find out about it!  So comment and discuss below if NTFS file recovery is relevant to you.

Also, other programs that you might find of use if you're going to hack on this yourselves include:
1. A Hex editor (I currently prefer HxD but am still on the lookout for a better free one).
2. PowerISO (a register-ware tool designed to produce ISOs for money that just happens to have free functionality to browse and extract files from multiple file systems stored in drive image files as a side-feature)
3.  NTFS compression (a feature built into Windows) can allow you to work with larger images, especially if the drive was partially empty.  All those sectors full of 0's effectively take up no space at all anymore!  Be warned, however, NTFS compressed files are harder to recover, so I wouldn't store anything ELSE on a compressed volume other than images of drives for which you still have the original drive.

--Algo Rhythm