Data Recovery from Unreadable MFT

I have a friend who works as a freelance software developer. One day, the hard drive of his computer was crashed. He had all of his data on hard drive including his running project that was almost completed and some other modules that were further usable in other projects. Unfortunately he didn't have any backup. Struck with a grief of data loss and holding the hope of data recovery he came to me with his hard drive and told about his problem. I'm working as a hardware engineer in an organization.

I attached the hard drive on my computer as a slave and switched it on. Before booting the system it displayed a message that it requires to run CHKDSK on the hard drive. I let it go ahead, but by the time it start, a window pop up displaying an error message "Master File Table Unreadable" -then the computer just booted normally but the data were inaccessible.

Master File Table is probably the most important part of the system files that define a place where complete information about every file and directory on an NTFS partition is stored. It may get corrupted due to numerous reasons including virus attack, operating system failure, and unexpected system shutdown.

In this case, when MFT is unreadable, the operating system can't read the files from hard drive because it fails to find the path of the particular file. In these circumstances when MFT become unreadable the data becomes inaccessible.

I didn't faced such king of problem ever before, so i wasn't sure that data can be recovered completely. I searched on the net for help in this regards and I have seen many software products related to this problem but none of them was suitable form me because some were of them very expansive and some were complicated to run (I saw in screenshots). At last, my search ended with Stellar Phoenix NTFS Data Recovery software. I found it appropriate for me.

After downloading the demo version of the software, I started to search the lost data on my hard drive. After completing the search, the software displayed all the lost data in tree structure that was required. I selected the recover all files option and it displayed a message to purchase the serial key to save the files. I purchased the serial key from the company's site and activated the software in order to save the recovered files.