Ok, I've made a few mistakes.. So first I have to say, I know..

Well, this all started with my computer not booting up. I was unsure why and tried to boot in safe mode. This worked and so I did a system restore.
That seemed to fix it, until I was playing a game a day later and the entire computer froze, no mouse, keyboard, sound, or anything. So I tried re-setting it, and it wouldn't boot again. It came up with the message "Disk Boot Failure..."
So I tried starting in safe mode again, and that didn't work.
I found my Windows XP disk and booted from that, and went into the recovery console, where I did a bootfix and all that.
It still wouldn't boot after that, so I decided to try putting my C: drive in another computer. It booted up fine, and everything seemed well.
So, I moved it back to my normal computer, where it also booted fine, BUT I was to find that my other hard drive, which stored all my movies and iso's had been changed somehow to a 10GB drive with nothing on it!

I've come to the conclusion that the reason it wouldn't boot to begin with was just hardware problems, I'm guessing a bad IDE cable. What I think has happened is that when I did the bootfix, it wrote that onto my storage drive, and overwrote the file system.

So this is where (hopefully) you guys come in. I've tried downloading programs to restore the files, and they seem to detect them all fine. However, when I go to save the files the programs tell me that I need to purchase a license key or code in order to do anything remotely useful. So what I'm wondering is, could you guys advise me of a program to use to fix this? I'm willing to buy a program, and want to get one that will be useful in other circumstances as well. My first guess would be Norton Utilities, or a variation thereof.

P.S. Is it called a File System or a File Allocation Table? I think they're the same thing, but please correct me if I'm wrong..

Well...since you moved your boot drive to another system to test it...why not simply move the drive in question to another system...and see if the files are accessible...before worrying about recovery software/techniques?

Louis

I've already tried that, and got the same results :S

I guess I should've stated that as well...

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Alternatively you could download a Linux LiveCD and use it to examine the
drive and possibly copy data to a flash drive.

oh, awesome thanks, I'll try that out.

Unfortunately, that didn't work..

But I've found and tested a program which works. It's called GetDataBack for NTFS, created/produced by Runtime. You have to buy it in order to copy entire folders, but you can open seperate files in their corresponding programs, and then save them as new files in a different place. This takes a lot of time, but at least it works. (either do that, or just buy it and copy everything at once..)

Thanks for the help anyways