File recovery can be a bear, especially if you're trying to recover the family's business documents off of a hard drive that mysteriously goes kaput during an OS upgrade.

Enter the freeware file recovery application PC INSPECTOR File Recovery.

PC INSPECTOR File Recovery is the best software-based file recovery program I've ever found that is completely free for anyone to use. I got a crash course on how it worked early last year, and I was very impressed. Here's my story:

I had to recover files off a drive that, for some unknown reason, prevented me from viewing its contents. I was upgrading my parents' computer to Windows XP when the old hard drive containing their previous OS and files failed to be recognized by the new OS. The drive in question was receiving power and was spinning up, but there was no easily identifiable reason for the drive not being accessible through XP. That's when I found the File Recovery program.

Using this program, I was able to read the contents of the improperly functioning hard drive, recover all of my parents' important documents off the drive, put them onto my computer, and then transfer the files to the new hard drive.

File recovery in general is not for the weak of heart or the eagerly excited. This program takes some patience to learn and patience to sit through one or two entire drive scans because you accidentally chose the incorrect scan options. I would advise anyone interested in using this program to get a competent, technology-savvy individual to help you out. There are times when impatient individuals may mistake their computer freezing up for a system crash, when in reality the program is using 100% of the CPU to scan the culprit drive. Scans of drives can also take upwards of 15-20 minutes; it is important during this time to leave the computer that is scanning the drive alone unless you want to brick your drive and lose all of your data (or, if you prefer to to pay for professional, $1000+ harddrive recovery...).

I took the liberty of capturing some screens of the program to show you what it looks like in action:

1. You have the option of recovering accidentally deleted files, scanning a drive for accidentally formatted files, and recover an entire drive if it fails to show up.

2. After your computer is scanned for attached hard drives (regardless of if they're recognized by Windows or not), File Recovery shows you all the drives it can scan. Choose one and click the check-mark.

3. You'll see a progress bar displaying how far into the scan the program is; don't expect it to move real fast, especially if you're recovering files off of a large-capacity drive.

3a. During the scan, its not unusual for the program to use close to 100% of the CPU and for your computer to run like molasses.

4. When the scan is complete, you'll get an explorer-esque file tree of all the files that you've "deleted". To recover a file, click on the folder you want to recover, right-click and select "Save to...". Choose an output folder (on another drive, obviously) and the program will recover the presumed-lost files. The same works for drives that no longer display under My Computer on XP.