I have tried this utility several times, as well as comparing it with others in this category. Results vary somewhat, but generally speaking, this one does not find any more or less files than some of the FREE utilities. The price for this one is totally ridiculous. I'll stick with the FREE 'Recuva', available from www.recuva.com.

On my Windoze 98SE machine, I'm getting an error when I try to install Recover My Files 3.9.8.5837...

error while unpacking program, code 4. Please report to author.

I have tried downloading this program from several different sites and I get the same error at install.

Problem: corrupted Western Digital external USB 60GB hard drive – “RAW” directory not recognized and files not accessible. Before purchasing a recovery package I tested several “trial” products purporting a high success rate in recovering FAT files that included Stellar Phoenix FAT&NTFS (does not provide preview), Data Doctor Recovery FAT, PC Inspector File Recovery, and ZMeil 1.1.
The “trial” download version of RecoverMyFiles version 3.98 appeared to recover some of the files files. It was very difficult to determine exactly how many files it recovered or could not recover. The big downside was instead of the disk’s original tree directory list folders, subfolders and files, the recovery program produced a long list of renamed files bearing no resemblance to the original file names. This may be ok for small amount of data but makes it very difficult if you have a disk with lots of data. I was reluctantly willing to live with this if original photographs were recoverable. After making purchase for full version, I had to rescan the 60GB hard drive that contained a little over 55GB of data that took over twelve hours with almost a complete failure in recovering the data (jpeg, PDF, txt, html, doc,etc.). Thousands of files were listed as recovered but without original file name, I had to go through long list and click on individual files to preview. Files that had appeared intact in trial version were either missing or damaged with the paid version.

Desperate to recover crucial photographs recently downloaded onto the disk for upcoming publication, I hit the web again and stumbled upon a Washington-Post article on GetDataBack (Runtime Software). After reading the review I went to the product web site and downloaded the free trial version. Without a doubt had I come across this program during my original search, I would have immediately purchased it, saving time and frustration. The GetDataBack for FAT files full version scanned the hard drive in approximately 2.5 hours (vs. 12 hours with RecoverMyFiles) producing the entire tree directory (all folders, subfolders and files). More importantly, each and every file, thousands worth, were intact with no corrupted or missing files, providing further evidence that RecoverMyFiles fails miserably in attempts to recover FAT32 files.