File Scavenger® can also recover files from a reformatted or corrupted volume even when the volume has been deleted and its original position and size are unknown. File Scavenger® can scan an entire physical hard drive to look for traces of defunct volumes.

File Scavenger® uses advanced algorithms to handle disks with bad sectors and badly corrupted partitions. It can be installed on a hard drive or run from a portable storage device such as a memory stick, removable drive, CD or floppy disk. To run File Scavenger®, you must log on as a system administrator to the computer where data recovery is intended.

Files can only be restored if the disk areas allocated to the files have not been overwritten by new data. All recovered files should be validated for the integrity of the recovered data.

What you do after data is lost will decide whether it can be recovered or not. Certain activities may result in permanent loss of data.

Immediately protect the subject drive to ensure no new data is written to it. Then follow one of the procedures below, depending on the circumstance and available resources:

1. Recovery procedures for a system drive.
1. Best recovery procedure (more work).
2. 95% efficient recovery procedure (less work).


2. Recovery procedure for a data drive.

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• "The competition would either lock up or crash my computer when they tried to scan this funky drive"
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Compared to version 2.1, version 3 can find lost data in more scenarios, run much faster, scan very large disks (containing up to one million files) and support FAT and FAT32 volumes. The interface has been greatly streamlined. There are new commands to save and reload a session to avoid having to rescan a disk.

• Recovers the original filename and folder path.
• Recovers files deleted from a network share. (File Scavenger must be run on the computer where the share is defined.)
• Recovers files deleted in a DOS command window.
• Recovers files removed from the Recycle Bin.
• Recovers files deleted from Windows Explorer with the SHIFT key held down.
• Recovers data from reformatted volumes.
• Recovers files from deleted volumes.
• Is especially effective in recovering digital images in JPEG format.
• Recovers files from broken striped volumes (RAID 0 or RAID 5) or volume sets (spanned volumes).
• Supports NTFS compression.
• Provides English and German versions.
• Supports both basic and dynamic disks.
• Transparently handles bad sectors when possible. Otherwise allows the user to skip ranges of bad sectors.
• Scans badly damaged partitions.
• Supports alternate data streams and sparse files.
• Can search for file patterns or file types.
• Recovers multiple files in one click.
• Can sort files by date, size, name, type, path, etc.
• Restores the original Create and Modified dates.
• Supports Unicode filenames.
• Scans very large volumes (hundreds of gigabytes) holding up to a few million files or more on a computer with sufficient RAM.
• Detects certain file types based on their data patterns, thus allowing recovery even when the file system structure is totally lost.
• Saves a search session to a disk file for reloading later so that a drive needs not be scanned again.
• Scans disk image files.
• Supports FAT and FAT32, but in a limited manner due to the inherent weakness in those file systems.

A Personal Use license is intended for individual use and can be used on a single computer. A Personal Use license can be transferred from the original computer to a second computer in the following scenarios:

• The original computer is being retired and replaced by the second computer.
• The license is bought for the original computer for testing. The actual use is intended for the second computer.

The right to transfer licenses is not intended to allow a Personal Use license to be used as a floating license among multiple computers.

A Professional Use license is intended for a computer support person who needs to use the program on other people's computers. A Professional Use license is registered to a named individual and can be used by the individual on any computer. A Professional Use license can be transferred to a second individual when the original licensee no longer intends to use the product, such as in the case of permanent change in job assignments. The right to transfer licenses is not intended to allow a Professional Use license to be shared by multiple users.

To request a license transfer, please click here.