Please recommend data recovery tool

I have a drive that shows up in the bios and spins. When placed in a
machine with a good drive and good O/S it slows the machine startup
down for what seems to be an eternity. When XP finally comes up from
the good drive, this bad drive doesn't give a drive letter. I
believe therefore that the drive is OK (motor, interface) but it must
really be scrambled.

Can anyone point me to a good recovery tool - one that is not a
fortune, good success rate and easy to use ? I don't think it's ready
for a $1000 + clean room service yet.

Thanks in advance.

No drive letter means the partition table was unreadable or corrupt.

You should start by looking for errors in eventvwr (start/run) and disk
management.

wrote in message
...
I have a drive that shows up in the bios and spins. When placed in a
machine with a good drive and good O/S it slows the machine startup
down for what seems to be an eternity. When XP finally comes up from
the good drive, this bad drive doesn't give a drive letter. I
believe therefore that the drive is OK (motor, interface) but it must
really be scrambled.

Can anyone point me to a good recovery tool - one that is not a
fortune, good success rate and easy to use ? I don't think it's ready
for a $1000 + clean room service yet.

Thanks in advance.