Stellar Phoenix Fat + NTFS

Stellar Information Systems is based in India and has offices in New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata and Gurgaon. In addition to its recovery utilities it offers data recovery services.

Stellar Phoenix uses the Windows Explorer interface model with a simple three-pane window layout.

There’s a directory tree running in a vertical strip down the left-hand side, a pane to the right to display the files and sub-directory folders. Disks or folders are selected from the tree and an activity log display pane runs along the bottom of the window.

Panes can be resized in the normal way by clicking and dragging the dividers. As one of the more expensive recovery utilities of the six reviewed, Stellar Phoenix has a surprisingly limited feature set. There’s no native format file viewer and no floppy, CD or DVD support.

On startup all the program panes are disconcertingly blank and there is no option to set an automatic scan on start.

To get started you first have to select a physical disk to scan. All recognised devices are represented as hard disks and identified by number rather than by device type and drive letter, making it hard to know what you are selecting.

For example, you have your system/boot drive as C, second hard disk as D, optical drives as E and F and a four-port memory card reader with a CF memory card inserted in its second port that’s assigned drive letter H.

If it’s the CF memory card you want to scan, you have to work out that it’s HardDrive 4. In this case drive C will be 1, D will be 2, E and F are ignored because they are a CD and DVD, G is 3 and so finally the drive you want to select is 4.

Once selected, scanning a hard disk can take quite a while: on our test machine it took 80 minutes to scan a 38GB volume.

The price seems a little too high for a program with these limitations.

This article is part of a grooup test. All articles in the test are as follows:
A quick recovery
Active Data Recovery Active@ Undelete 
Binary Biz Virtual Lab
Ontrack Easy Recovery Lite
PC Tools File Recover 5
R-Tools Technology R-Studio 
Retaining control of your data
Broken drives and professional data retrieval labs