Expectations for NTFS file recovery

on a 750Gb drive, GetDataBack will take an age, but is one of the best out there.

a drive i work with recently lost it's entire partition table for no explicable reason. GDB did a pretty good job of recovering it after several other progs failed.

Although the Master File Table (MFT) is corrupted, your disk may contain an MFT mirror which might still contain the lost file data.

TestDisk is open-source software and is advertised as capable of :

Fix MFT using MFT mirror

As this is a partition problem, I would hope that such a partition-oriented recovery product may prove more successful than the file-oriented PC INSPECTOR.

I haven't tried it personally, but a fairly savvy friend of mine had good success (considering the circumstances) recovering nearly 400GB of mostly 2GB+ sized files with NTFS Undelete. It might be worth a try. Convar, the maker of PC INSPECTOR™ File Recovery, is in the business of selling their professional data recovery services -- that alone would make me distrust the software.

As for the file extension strangeness, it appears that the recovery software you are using does attempt to "guess" the file's format from the data available.

Or is there perhaps something better out there?

there is indeed, meet WinHex, the ultimate in computer forensics and data recovery:

Disk editor for hard disks, floppy disks, CD-ROM & DVD, ZIP, Smart Media, Compact Flash, ...

Native support for FAT, NTFS, Ext2/3, ReiserFS, Reiser4, UFS, CDFS, UDF

Built-in interpretation of RAID systems and dynamic disks

Various data recovery techniques

RAM editor, providing access to physical RAM and other processes' virtual memory

Data interpreter, knowing 20 data types

Editing data structures using templates (e.g. to repair partition table/boot sector)

Concatenating and splitting files, unifying and dividing odd and even bytes/words

Analyzing and comparing files

Particularly flexible search and replace functions

Disk cloning (under DOS with X-Ways Replica)

Drive images & backups (optionally compressed or split into 650 MB archives)

Programming interface (API) and scripting

256-bit AES encryption, checksums, CRC32, hashes (MD5, SHA-1, ...)

Erase (wipe) confidential files securely, hard drive cleansing to protect your privacy

Import all clipboard formats, incl. ASCII hex values

Convert between binary, hex ASCII, Intel Hex, and Motorola S

Character sets: ANSI ASCII, IBM ASCII, EBCDIC, (Unicode)

Instant window switching. Printing. Random-number generator.

Supports files >4 GB. Very fast. Easy to use. Extensive online help.

p.s.: this is the stuff many major players in the IT and finance industry as well as law enforcement, the military and intelligence agencies all over the world swear by , check their Corporate Info.