Hi, Since you can see the icons in the damaged partition, i guess the allocation table / inode table is intact. What about trying the following things : -1) Try to read the files from the command prompt instead of windows explorer. Primitive but works sometimes. 0) As Pisces suggested, try data recovery softwares . There are some real good ones in the market now-a-days and they are safe too. (eg. VirtualLab Data Recovery/ Rtools data recovery ) 1) Why not give Partition magic 8 a shot? If it does wonders for username, it might for you too. If you don't have it, get it. P2P file sharing softwares are not just for downloading illegal music :-) 2) If (-1) , (0) and (1) don't work, it's time to depend upon out-of-band means. Try various tools that comes with ultimate boot CD (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/) . It's good to clone the hard disk first so that u can experiment with it freely. 3) This is something I wud have done in the beginning but I guess you don't have a linux (with 2.6 kernel ) installed in your PC. If u don't want to install linux in your HD, just get "Knoppix(http://www.knoppix.org/)" (make sure to get the latest version 'coz it has the 2.6 kernel that recognizes NTFS partition; if the damaged parition is FAT, any older release will do) , burn it in a CD and boot using it. It should be able to read the data off the partition. 4) Usually the hard disk vendors provide data recovery services. You can send them the hard disk and they will recover all the data for you. It's really expensive though. Apart from that,some local computer stores also provide that kind of services for a reasonable price. Well, hope something works out for you. Good luck! arch119