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ABOUT a year ago, a casual acquaintance called up with a problem: His computer wouldn't boot; all he got was a "Boot device not found" message. No amount of fiddling in the shop could bring the drive back. His backup copies were out of date. Since it had his clients' data on the hard disk, he had to do something. He eventually overnighted the drive to a service on the West Coast that recovered the data to a CD. Cost? About $800 and two days of not being able to get at the data. Yet this was still probably more cost-effective than finding and reentering all of the data.

A few weeks ago, I got a call from a friend who had a similar problem. His machine had a new 8GB hard drive as his boot drive with Windows 95 on it, his applications, and some data. The older, 1.2GB drive had been left in as a second drive, and it had the data for a genealogy research project on it. The trouble was that his machine was now reporting "Drive Not Found" and/or "Drive Not Ready" messages for the second drive.

You may remember the visit from PowerQuest at a recent DACS General Meeting. The primary product demonstrated was Partition Magic, which lets you reorganize your hard-disk partitions on the fly without reformatting and/or loss of data. I have been a Partition Magic user for several years, and probably as a result of having registered my copies I got an e-mail a little while ago introducing Power Quest's latest product, Lost & Found.

If you don't read all of the text on the box or in the product description, you might think that Lost & Found is just another unerase program. Unerase programs date back to pre-Windows days. It was with such utility programs that publishers like Norton and Central Point became famous. Yes, Lost & Found has the ability to recover erased files (even when you use the DOS DEL command, which bypasses the Windows Recycle Bin).

You do not have to install Lost & Found before the file is erased. The program doesn't just "hide" a copy of the file as does the Windows Recycle Bin. Instead it reconstructs the file from information left on the disk, with the minor exception that it has to ask you for the first character of the filename. This is because DOS replaces the first character of a deleted file's name with a nonprintable character when a file is deleted. That's not too big a price to pay. And if you haven't already written a lot of data to the drive, there is even a good chance that it can recover files on drives that have been formatted.

This is all well and good, but it doesn't put Lost & Found very far ahead of some of the other utilities out there. Where Lost & Found makes a giant leap is that it uses the same intimate knowledge of hard-disk structures that Partition Magic uses to get at data that would otherwise be inaccessible--such as would be the case when your computer doesn't even recognize that the disk exists!

My friend with the lost genealogy data is an example: His BIOS screen reported only his boot drive; we could not get the machine to even see the second drive. We changed cables. We put the drive in other machines. Nothing. We tried "AUTO" IDE identification. We put in manual entries that we had recorded when the drive was originally installed. (You do have that information stored somewhere, don't you?) But we still could not get at the drive. So we put the drive back in the original machine, put in the settings to have the BIOS do an "AUTO" detect, and then ran Lost & Found.

The first thing you need to know about Lost & Found is that it is a DOS program. You cannot run it under Windows anything. Some might say that this is also the secret to its success: It doesn't have to rely upon Windows to do anything, and it doesn't have to take anything for granted.

To run Lost & Found, you need to boot to the C> prompt (no, you can not just open up a DOS command prompt, you must boot to the C> prompt), then put the Lost & Found diskette in the A: drive, switch to A:, and type LF. That's the extent of the amount of DOS you need to know. By the way, since the program is a DOS character-mode application, you won't see any screen shots in this review. I had no easy way to get them.

During the Initialization phase, Lost & Found will take a good look at your machine and report what it finds. It knows how to identify and repair IDE, EIDE, and SCSI devices. It reported the particulars for the primary drive, which was no big surprise. Smiles came up on our faces when it reported that it had found the second drive, complete with manufacturer, model, size, head count, etc. This brought us to a decision: We had to tell Lost & Found which drive had the problem and where we wanted it to put the recovered data.

About recovered data: You can deal with it in several ways. Probably the best option is to put it in a directory on another drive. Since the working, primary hard drive had a 2GB partition that was empty, we elected to put it there. Other options available were to put it in a compressed file on a different drive, including network drive, or work on a file-by-file basis and recover to floppy. With about 1GB of data to be recovered, we did not consider recovery to floppy.

After we told Lost & Found where to look and where to put things, we went on to Step 2: Drive Analysis. This phase works essentially like a big ScanDisk, only more so. It looks at each piece of the drive and figures out what is there. When it started, it almost immediately reported that it had found a 1.2GB drive with one partition and 437 directories/folders (two more, bigger smiles) and 13,830 files (two absolutely huge grins). It then said it would need about 20 minutes to complete the analysis. We went to the kitchen for a snack.

When we came back, we found that we were getting a lot of clicking from the drive and that Lost & Found was reporting that it had come across some "Sector not found" errors, and was retrying to reread the sector of the disk. After it failed a predefined number of attempts, it would move on to the next sector and resume, and update the estimated time to completion. Unfortunately, the estimated time to completion had grown to 845 days and 11 hours, which we decided was a bit much.

I noticed the number of the sector that Lost & Found was trying to read and did a quick calculation and determined that it now thought the drive was considerably larger than 1.2GB. We stopped the machine, rebooted and went into the BIOS. This time, the BIOS reported the correct number of tracks, heads, and cylinders, where before it had just listed that it would use AUTO detect mode. We started Lost & Found again, and it went to work on the drive again. This time it took less than 20 minutes to examine the drive, ran into only a few bad sectors, and proceeded to the next phase.

In the "Recovery" phase, Lost & Found reconstructed the directory and file structure from the bad drive, placing the results in the designated area on the good drive. Here is where we ran into mild disappointment #1: All of the files and directories are displayed in their DOS names, so you only get the 8.3 notation. It displayed the structure in a tree view, using color to indicate the probability that a file could be recovered. We were glad to see that everything looked good, with the exception of a lot of deleted files, which we didn't care about. To bring back a file, you click on it. The prospect of clicking on all of those files wasn't too exciting, but you can also click on a folder to select all of the files in the folder. And you can select everything with a single press of the F2 key. That's what we did. We then let it loose.

With a lot of rattling of both hard drives, Lost & Found went to work. It took about 40 minutes to bring back all but four files.

The last step was to reboot the machine into Windows 95 and then execute a batch file that Lost & Found created for us. This file restored the file names to their original "long name" values. Had we used one of the other options (e.g. restore to compressed file) we would have needed to use a utility provided on the second installation diskette to extract the requested file from the compressed image.

My friend started DiskJockey Pro and started browsing the directory structure within the location where we had Lost and Found place the recovered file. His word-processing files came up in the DJ viewer. His scanned images came up. All was well. We don't know what was wrong with the drive and probably never will. The drive is no longer in the machine: It is now serving as a paperweight on my friend's desk, reminding him to do backups.

PowerQuest's literature says that Lost & Found will recover from damaged drives, and/or if the file allocation table (FAT) is destroyed. The manual (44 pages, six of which are fine print legal stuff) is reasonably clear. But I would have liked a bit more elaborate overview of the process, since the documentation doesn't differentiate between what you have to do if you want to recover an erased file, a formatted drive, or a damaged drive.

You should be able to find Lost & found on your retailer's shelves right now for about $60 or so. That's a lot better than paying $800 to a recovery service. Lastly, before you decide that maybe you can go into the business of recovering data, you should know that PowerQuest has somehow set up Lost & Found so that it can only be installed onto one machine. I am going to guess that they somehow "brand" the diskette with something unique to your machine. I don't care. For product specifications, visit PowerQuest at www.powerquest.com.