Cheap Tracks -

I haven't had the need to use any recovery utilities since adding a couple of NTSF drives. The advice above is quoted from the Norton page that was linked. There is additional info there.

When a file is deleted, only a few "marker" bytes are actually rewritten. If you can put the markers back, recovery is possible, and the utilities available make it pretty easy - where there's anything to recover.

Of course, if it's on your root disk, just running the machine writes temp files all over the place, so you're likely to get some overwrites, especially if the disk is pretty well filed and your assigned temp space is small.

NTFS does have a more complex "indexing" structure, so if you get into having to reassemble clusters it takes pretty specific knowledge - and it's pretty hard to find even a coherent description of the details of the NTFS structure.

The real problem here is that a major recovery operation is needed, and playing around with an unknown program isn't necessarily the best thing to do - if you have access to someone who has a program likely to work and who already knows how to use it.

John