HOW TO RECOVER DATA FROM A CORRUPTED secondary HD (USB or not)?

Obviously, that's the worst that can happen with your computer.

THE STORY:

I have a 250Gb external HD (USB port connection). Recently, I decided to split up the HD in several partitions. For that, I used Partition Magic, because it gets fairly good reviews on specialized web site and magazines. What's nice with Partition Magic is that you can plan all the jobs on the HD (partition, format, etc) under Windows (no DOS stuff). Then after clicking on [Apply] button, Partition Magic reboot the computer and before initializing the OS, Partition Magic starts the changes. At this point, there is no intervention of the user. Depending on the job or the size of the HD, it can take up to 30 minutes for the job to be finalized. Finally, the PC re-boots once again and ... here you are with your partitioned or formatted HD.

HOWEVER, there are plenty of chances that everything does not go as it should. In my case, what happened is that during the time Partition Magic was working on the HD partition, my laptop crashes. On the re-boot, my secondary HD was not anymore accessible. A check with Partition Magic showed Error #7 and error #46. Basically, it means that the partition information is lost and that PM cannot retrieve it. As a consequence, the files on the HD are not accessible: can't be read, can't be copied, etc..

On my HD, I had critical data, so one of the solutions to my problem was out of question: format the disk and re-partition the disk.

The second solution: Use a data recovery software.

Several softwares are available to recover data from damaged/corrupted HD:
    1) RESTORER 2000
    2) Active@ file Recovery

This is an amazing program that enables you to recover data from a corrupted HD. Obviously, I could not recover all the data, but the program allowed me to recover most of my data.