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Two recent disasters — a hard disk fried by heat from a failing fan cooler and another with a damaged partition — ushered me into the weird world of data recovery. There are many products that recover data from destroyed drives, yet I chose these for idiosyncratic reasons: Lifeboat and Active@ Boot Disk are Canadian products, and RecoverSoft Data Rescue PC was recommended to me by, of all people, the technical brains behind Lifeboat. And I was curious about Iolo's tool, because I tend to get a little overenthusiastic about erasing files.

Data recovery rookies must learn a few things about the nature of file systems and data storage, many of which will give you new reason to grumble about Microsoft. One of the first is that the only real way to get at a hard disk is via good old-fashioned DOS, an operating system that can be put on a floppy disk and one that Microsoft has been trying to kill since Windows ME.

But DOS cannot die: without that ultra-basic operating system, you won't be able to look at anything on the disk. Put DOS on a floppy, as well as small file that can read the NTFS file system created by Windows XP and read it on large disks, and you can read almost anything on the hard disk.

Getting the data is less of a problem than actually putting it somewhere. What you generally need is an outboard disk drive or a network connection to another computer to make this happen. If you're using an outboard drive, the target drive — the one the rescued data is going to — must be formatted in the FAT32 system. And FAT32 will not allow you to format more than about 32 gigabytes of the outboard disk, so the entire process might take some time if there's a lot of data to rescue.

On the upside, however, you feel like you're working in some episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, muttering sagely about how erasing files doesn't necessarily get them completely off the disk. You can feel really geeky and be a hero to your friends for saving their files. And, as another bonus, these tools cost a lot less than taking the wounded drive to a professional; that can cost between $700 and $2,000, but none of these three costs more than $129 (U.S.).

Each of these data recovery tools has an advantage over the others, and you might have to choose the one best for you on the basis of the extent of the disaster and your hardware setup.

Lifeboat 3.0 Tugboat Enterprises , $99.99 (U.S.)

• Rating: Five stars; ease of use: Easy
• The Good: Very easy to deploy.
• The Bad: It needs a network.
• The Verdict: A superb tool.
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The sweetest of the lot is Lifeboat 3.0, from Tugboat Enterprises, which works for people who have more than one computer on a network, even a network as simple as a home workgroup. It's on a bootable CD; after it rolls into action, it asks you to identify the damaged drive, and to confirm the network connection. This even works with a damaged operating system (Windows) or with a damaged video card.

Lifeboat creates a "network place" on the other networked computer(s), and all you need to do then is to open that connection in the target computer and start copying the data over from the mangled machine. You are not constrained by the limitations of DOS at all here.

This is ideal for something like a busted partition.

Included with the program is a comprehensive manual, which almost seems irrelevant considering the ease with which the software works.

This is a brilliant way of saving information, far easier than most other products I've seen. You don't have to remove the hard disk or worry about the limitations of DOS. It is also a very simple thing to start going: You buy the program, download the ISO file, and burn it onto a CD or DVD, which is bootable (just make sure your BIOS is set to boot from the CD first). The entire process might take as few as three mouse clicks.

But not so fast: There are a few other things you have to know before you can continue. One is that data-recovery tools generally work in strict read-only status, so that there is no chance of further damaging the data on an already limping drive. You might have to reset the file attributes to both read and write once the file has been moved. No big deal. And you should also carefully track where the files go: Sometimes you're rescuing data from a folder many layers down.

No, even when it's as easy to recover data as Lifeboat makes it, it's still a lot of work.

The price of the program ($99.99 U.S.) raises one of those dilemmas: it's too much to spend before you need it; but when you do, it will be a small price to pay.

Tugboat Enterprises has a sister program, called Coracle, after an ancient kind of boat (the water theme is everywhere here; the company is in the small town of Powell River, B.C., and its website has a webcam trained on two hummingbird feeders, with the Strait of Georgia right behind it). Coracle ($29.99 U.S.) operates much like Lifeboat, on a bootable CD, but without the data-recovery element. It is a basic file-transfer utility that is useful for many operations, but especially for recovered data.

Active@ Boot Disk 2.1 LSoft Technologies , $79.95 (U.S.)

• Rating: Five stars; ease of use: Medium
• The Good: It fixes busted partitions too.
• The Bad: It's a little geeky, but not hard to learn.
• The Verdict: A strong, basic data-recovery tool.
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The other Canadian company here is LSoft Technologies, of Mississauga, Ont., which produces a suite of tools under the name of Active@ Boot Disk. The tools include Uneraser, Partition Recovery, KillDisk, Disk Image, NTFS Reader and Password Changer.

The most important of these is Partition Recovery, a feature Lifeboat does not have. It will repair a busted partition, and will back up the Master Boot Record, the partition table and the boot sectors. It can also restore the Master Boot Record from a backup if partition structure was damaged by a virus or was deleted, and allows the user to create disk images for backup. Sometimes, depending on the extent of the damage, this might be enough to get the operating system running again.

Not in my case, so I had to start using a program such as Uneraser. That program will recover lost, deleted and formatted data from hard drives, floppy disks, basic and dynamic volumes, hardware or software. Compressed, encrypted and fragmented files are also supported. Besides hard disk drives and floppies, the program supports recovery from removable devices like Secure Digital, Compact Flash, SmartMedia, SONY Memory Stick, ZIP drives and USB Hard drives.

It will even get data from disks formatted in the FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, NTFS5, and NTFS+EFS file systems.

You'll wonder why you never had a program like this at hand all the time.

KillDisk is exactly what its name implies, though not in physical terms. It overwrites all the data on the disk enough times to render it permanently erased, even to its sister recovery tools, which is a good thing to do if you have data you want to disappear forever.

Disk Image will make an image of a disk in much the same way Norton Ghost will: a sector-by-sector copy to another, healthier drive. The NTFS Reader is necessary to read files on a disc partitioned in the NTRFS format, and the Password Changer is a DOS-based product designed for resetting local user passwords on Windows NT, 2000, XP and 2003 systems in case the administrator has gone walkabout and the password is forgotten or lost. Recovery software has a basic user interface, and supports multiple hard disk drives.

For recovering software, it also works on a bootable disk concept, and will look for any form of storage attached to the computer, such as a USB external drive or a second internal drive to transfer to data to from the damaged source.

These tools are excellent and will rescue lost data for less cost than the others: $79.95 (U.S.).

The only problem I had with Active@ Boot Disk is that it needs more polish; a slicker interface would help. For example, as I was trying to get data from a damaged hard drive, it insisted on trying to get at data without telling me that the surface of the disk had been damaged. You would sense this if you are a professional, but most users will just wonder why it's running so slowly.

Still, this will not bother the advanced amateur, who will be able to master its intricacies quickly, and look like a wizard in the process.

RecoverSoft Data Rescue PC, Prosoft Engineering , $129.95 (U.S.)

• Rating: Five stars; ease of use: Medium
• The Good: A true forensic tool for recovering even fragmented data.
• The Bad: Just the one data recovery tool, without LSoft's extras or Lifeboat's ease.
• The Verdict: A great tool if you don't mind getting your hands dirty.
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RecoverSoft Data Rescue PC, from Prosoft Engineering, is the Rolls Royce of the recovery tools I've tried, at a Rolls Royce price too: $129 (U.S.). Well, come to think of it, it's a lot cheaper after all.

It has a serious but understandable interface, and makes data recovery simple. It also gives you a chilling feeling when you see what's on the disk.

Because it's a deep-down-and-dirty program, it looks really deeply for lost data. It will present the data to you in four levels of acceptability: Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor. The files that were intact on the disk when it went south are at the top, in the "excellent" category, and have the best chance of being recovered. The three levels down from that represent ghostly images of files that had been deleted but not yet overwritten, files partly overwritten, or files moved during defragmentation process.

This is the kind of stuff that makes you feel like a real sleuth. It's amazing what you'll find just rummaging about. But you can spend a lot of time doing this too.

Like Active@ Boot Disk, RecoverSoft Data Rescue PC wants you to store recovered data on an attached drive; it will not recognize a network, like Lifeboat does.

It is more of a forensics tool, used to retrieve stuff you had erased long ago, as well as for rescuing current data. Or for cops who want to find a copy of that receipt you thought you had deleted for your purchase of all that fertilizer.

I was playing with all three programs and I didn't note which I had been using when it came to reconstructing my password-keeping program. The password keeper I use is part of the Symantec Internet Security suite, and it had stored something like 70 passwords for me, most of which I had no way of recovering just by poking my own memory with a stick.

Still, I found the original data file, recovered it, dropped it into the appropriate directory on the target machine, and I was off to the races again. The password cache is something I had just about given up on, if only because of its built-in encryption. But it worked just as well on the new machine as it had on the damaged one.

Search and Recover 3, Iolo Technologies , $39.95 (U.S.)

• Rating: Five stars; ease of use: Easy
• The Good: An excellent recovery tool for erased files
• The Bad: It's slow, and limited to recovering files on a healthy system, not on a damaged one.
• The Verdict: A good tool, with few frills.
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Finally, Iolo's Search and Recover 3 is a simple desktop application that rummages about to find files that were deleted or damaged. It can recover files from a variety of sources, including any hard drive, floppy, digital camera medium and even optical media, such as CD and DVD discs, from formatted drives and lost partitions, e-mail (from Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, Netscape, Thunderbird and Eudora, even after they have been individually deleted) and all of Outlook's other files.

It will also mirror an entire drive and preview files, pictures, songs and documents, using streaming technology.

Not only that, but Iolo is offering free unlimited phone and e-mail technical support. And when was the last time we saw that kind of service?

A new version of the program, called Search and Recover 4, is due out any day now, and it includes a few new features, including a one-click wizard that recovers, saves and recreates data. It also includes a spruced-up interface; improved data imaging that creates virtual drives from damaged or inaccessible media as well as any hard drive, CD, or DVD.

The preview technology has been enhanced to see, hear or read multimedia files even before going through the lengthy process of recovering them, and there's an improved data security option that permanently deletes any file or folder, so no data-recovery tool can find it any more.

The price ($39.95 U.S.) remains the same.

A word of caution, though — and this is an advisory that can be applied to all file-recovery programs: If you want to recover just about every file on the drive, you have to be patient. Scanning a 250 GB drive, for instance, took me more than two days. Yes, days. You have to wonder how on Law and Order the cops hand over a damaged disk to a technician, who then recovers all the data and sorts through everything before the cops' shift is over. These are the same tools the cops use, and there's just no rushing them.

I have talked about the odd feeling of accomplishment one gets from recovering data. I'm not joking about this: It's truly wonderful to rescue your data — or someone else's, for that matter. So impressive, so geeky. Investing in any of these suites is not just for bailing yourself out of an emergency, it can help you bail out friends. And their gratitude is something that's worth every penny you spent.