Data recovery now

I advise you to back up your data from time to time before it is too late.  You wouldn’t have to go trough recovery procedures if you have your data copied somewhere else. But if you don’t have backup don’t panic.  There are ways to retrieve precious files.  I will go through some essential things when it goes to data recovery.

Try to set up disk on another computer

You can’t boot your system.  You  can first try to set up your hard drive on another computer. Maybe some system files are corrupted  and you can’t boot operating system but  your  other files are ok and can be  accessed via other operating system.  If everything is ok your drive will show up in my computer like normal drive or partition. Grab most important data first because this is risky process and your drive may stop working any time. When you do that you can try to copy whole data structure to other disk and slowly select and categorize old data.

Try some mechanic things

Maybe the files are ok but some mechanical part of hard disk is dying. Try some basic things like reorienting drive. If it was classic desktop laying flat try to switch it to side or even standing up.  This can work in some cases. If it heats up a lot try  pointing fan to it and the things can get better. If heating is not the problem and disk is on power source but you don’t hear a thing from it try to gently hit it on the table. The disk may be stuck  and needs a shake to continue working.

Try to replace electronics

Every disk consists of electronic parts and mechanical parts. Mechanics is may be ok but in some cases electronics is the reason of broken drive. You have to buy same model (new or used) unscrew the board and replace with working drive.

All the time when your files are in recycle bin you don’t worry too much about them. You know files are there and if you ever need them you will recover them by easy steps. But it is not always the case. Only click of death divides you from completely deleted files and files in a trash can. This is of course only view of operating system. When you delete file in windows environment file is not really deleted from hard disk meaning there are no zeros written to that cylinder head and sector of hard drive. That would be too much processing time for your computer so operating system only marks those files like they do not exist. When some other data needs to be written to hard disk old file be rewritten with new useful data. Not only emptying recycle bin can cause date to be lost. Many more situations can be dangerous like virus takes over your computer, it get some physical damages like fall from desk or something like that.

Restore points

This is especially important with windows operating systems series.  Before any major operating system change like installing new applications messing up with system files or boot sector make sure you create restore point. Recovery of your old data would be much easier. Take snapshot of your operating system from time to time when it is running normal. Take practice to do it on weekly or monthly basis.

Save data twice

You should always have more copies of important data. For example you should have one burnt down on optical storage and other on hard disk. If something  fails down you have redundant media where your files are on. You can do that with raid array of hard disks in mirroring mode,  like more expensive solution or you can alternatively burn specific files to optical storage so later recovery may be cheaper.

Third solution

If anything of these two methods is just not working you will have to try specialized software  designed to scan entire optical or magnet drive from first sector to last sector in hope to find some readable bits. This is great for windows data recovery because if some files are just unreadable some other are. You have to be a little lucky that your important files are that one readable. In case they are physically damaged it is very hard to retrieve them almost impossible.

You can format your hard drive in four primary partitions.  One of them can be extended partition. You  can format that partition in multiple logical drives. Limit for four partitions is because master boot record (MBR) by standard supports four partitions to be created. MBR is located at first sector of hard disc.  The problem can be found when you have multiple partitions of different kind. For example some FAT32 and some NTFS ones.  If you set up dual booting with Windows 98 and XP and one of primary partitions is NTFS and one is FAT32 formatted and extended partitions is also divided in NTFS and FAT partitions problem can occur.  For example you want to delete FAT partition which is located after NTFS on logical disk and restart you machine NTFS partition would be inaccessible.

You can avoid this by using  Windows logical disk manager  to change local drives information.  I do not recommend you to use fdisk when there is windows 98-xp scenario.  If you do not have backup of your specific partition to apply to newly created partition then you can use windows data recovery software to back up your data. That software is designed to scan entire disk drive and search for deleted missing or corrupted files folders and partitions. You can use products from Acronis, Norton , Prosoft Engineering and others to perform scanning algorithms trough hard disk to recover your lost files.