Data Recovery Known and Unknown Facts

Data Recovery is the process of salvaging the data from corrupted or inaccessible storage devices when the device reaches a condition where it can not be accessed in the general way. The data often can be salvaged from the storage devices like Hard Disks, Tape Disks, Floppy Disks, RAID Drives, DVDs and CDS. There are two major reasons of data loss- Physical damage to the storage media or the logical damage to file system of the disk that prevents our drive from being accessible by the operating system.

Physical Damage

Physical damage means the corruption to the physical parts of the storage devices. There are a number of possibilities such as the improper working of hard drive due to the technical failure like head crashes, motor fail or improper power supply. Tape drives can generally break when kept in the bag while traveling and CD ROM drives can get their layers scratched off are some common reasons that most probably happens and cause data loss. Physical storage media damage always causes some type of logical damage as well as there are some clusters shattered which are inaccessible.

You should always keep in mind that you can not repair the physically damaged disks by yourself because it may cause more damage. There are two common reasons because of them you can not open it yourself:

• If you open the drive in general room can more damage because it leads to dust resolution on the surface on the drive.
• You are not trained for that and you may not have proper equipments required to open a disk.

To overcome these problems, you should consult data recovery service provider companies. These companies provide the facility of a maintained data recovery lab called “Clean Room” and also have the experienced and professional data recovery associates. If any kind of logical damage is also exist with the drive then these companies recover data from it also. Data recovery services are same for all kind of hard drive, no matter what is the operating system and file system used.

Logical Damage

The Logical damages happen more commonly as compared to that of Physical damage. This is mainly caused due to improper maintenance where the file systems are prevented from being entirely written to the storage media. This may result in the variation in the state of the file system and can cause many problems such as operating system corruption and system boot error. Logical damage may also happen due to the virus attack. These reasons may cause actual data loss.

If these situations are occurred up to a limited stage, then these may be repaired with the inbuilt operating system utilities. These system utilities include Chkdsk in Microsoft Windows and cdisk in Linux.

If these general system utilities are failed to recover your lost data, you may use special data recovery software. These software are designed to recover data from corrupted or damaged storage media. You may also recover the deleted data with the help of these software. These software are divided into different categories according to the Operating system and file system of the particular operating system.

Stellar Information Systems Ltd. is the company that provides both Logical and Physical Data Recovery solutions. The company has featured Class 100 Clean Rooms and provides the recovery services in almost all cases of physical damage. Under Logical solutions, company provide a wide range of data recovery software for all of the operating systems including Windows, Max OS X, Unix, Linux, and Novell along with all popular file systems of these operating system like FAT 16, FAT 32, NTFS, HFS, HFS+, UFS, VxFS, Ext2, Ext3, NWFS and NSS.
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Hard Drive Data Recovery

CD ROM Recovery

CD or Compact Disk is the standard medium for storing all kinds of digital data in machine readable from. It is the disc of polycarbonate plastic, with a thin layer of aluminum to make a reflective surface. These digital data types include Audio, Video, Images and Text files. These data are accessible with a laser based reader. CDs are more accurate and faster than magnetic tape for data storage. CD use random access method means you can access data directly from the specified track and sector. The data on the CD surface is written in the binary form and system can directly read it.

These are the most commonly and widely used removable storage media because it has more storage capacity then magnetic tape drives and floppy drives. Many people use them for storing music file of both audio and video types and some other use them for storing their data or text files. Both of them may use it for taking back up of their valuable data.

Though CDs are faster and accurate type of storage media but these are more prone to failure. The surface of these disks is very sensitive and can be damaged due to several reasons. This type of damage includes scratches on one side of the disk, warping, or something that has damaged the plastic disk. This type of corruption means the dye on the readable surface of the disk has failed or the pits are created on it and the drive is incapable to represent the binary bits written on the disk surface.

Any of these reasons can cause CD corruption and may cause data loss. It is very critical situation for you when you lost all of your data from your system and when you try to access them from the back up and you find inaccessible it also. In such conditions, you need to recover your data written on your CD. It’s not a big deal; you can recover these lost data from your CD very easily with the help of CD Data Recovery Software.
CD Data Recovery software are used for recovering the data from corrupted CDs. These software are very easy to use and fast processing tools. You can use these software by simply installing on your computer. You can recover data from your CD by following these simple steps:

1. Install the CD recovery software on your computer and insert the disk on your CD drive.
2. Select the logical drive on which your CD drive is installed and select scan option.
3. After successfully completing the scanning process, it will display the files written on your CD.
4. You can Save these files on the specified location and can also drag them where you want to store them.

By using these four simple steps, you can recover your lost data from CD either it is music file or it is the back up of your data.

Stellar Phoenix CDRom Data Recovery is the wonderful software of this category. It is an easy to use and read only CD data recovery software. You can recover data from CD, CD R and CD RW with the help of this software. This software supports Joliet and ISO9660 file system. You can recover CD with this software on three major operating systems- Windows, UNIX and Linux.

Can’t Detect SATA? How to Recover Data from It?

SATA or Serial Advanced Technology Attachment is a computer bus basically designed for transferring data between computer system and storage devices (such as hard drives and optical drives). SATA is most commonly used in Seagate hard drives.

SATA was designed as a successor to the legacy ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) standard, and is expected to eventually replace the older technology (PATA or Parallel ATA). SATA adapters and devices communicate over a high speed serial cable.
The main benefits of SATA are faster data transfer, less power consumption, better performance, ability to add or remove devices while operating, more reliable operation with tighter data integrity check then its older version and thinner cables that let air cooling work more efficiently.

Though SATA hard drives are more reliable and efficient then PATA hard drives, but these may also create problems. Sometimes when you start your computer, you may find an error message on your computer’s screen- “Can’t detect SATA” and your computer can’t boot. In such conditions your system can’t detect your hard drive and can’t read the operating system from your hard drive.

This problem may occur due to two reasons- Hardware and software. Hardware reasons include bad jumper setting, hard drive controller failure, and hard drive internal physical problems like head crash or motor stop.

Software reasons include operating system corruption, sudden catastrophic failure and other hard disk driver failure. Any of these failures, no matter what is the type, can make the hard drive inaccessible and may cause data loss.

Software reasons are the most commonly happening things that cause data loss. These are the logical error that can cause a big data loss. In such circumstances you should always back up your data. But in case you didn’t back up your data and data loss is occurred, you need data recovery.

In case of software reason of data loss, you can recover your data with the help of Data Recovery Software. This software is available in the market with a wide range of choice for the user. You can purchase any suitable software and can recover data from your inaccessible hard drive. You should always purchase software according to the operating system and the file system of your computer and type of data loss.
Before purchasing a software, you should make sure that the particular software you are going to purchase will support your operating system and file system or not, or this software can recover your data in your case.

How data loss occurs from VBR

A VBR (Volume Boot Record is a type of boot sector, stored in a disk volume on a hard drive. it is also known as a partition boot sector or a volume boot sector. It has the code for booting programs (generally but not essentially, operating systems) stored in other parts of the volume. On hard drive, it is the first sector of an individual partition on the device, with the first sector of the entire device instead being a MBR.

Some dual boot systems, such as Ntldr.exe, take copies of the bootstrap code that individual operating systems install into a single partition’s VBR. It store them in disc files, loading the relevant VBR content from file after the boot loader has asked the user which operating system to bootstrap.

In certain file system formats, in addition to bootstrap code, the VBR contains a BIOS parameter block that specifies the location and layout of the principal on-disc data structures for the file system.

The VBR resembles the MBR in that it contains two elements:
1. Hard disk drive parameter block: the hard disk drive BPB contains specified information about the location and layout of the principal on-disc data structures for the file systems, e.g., about the volume, its size, the number of hard disk drive sectors it uses, the size of the clusters, and the volume label name.

2. Volume boot code: the program or volume boot code is either directly invoked by the machine’s System ROM BIOS or indirectly by the MBR or boot manager (called chain loading). This begins the process of loading the operating system. For DOS and Windows 9x & Millennium file systems, this is the IO.SYS file.

VBR is the most important part of any hard drive. It helps user in executing any program stored on the particular volume of a hard drive. The VBR of the FAT file system is different from the NTFS’ but its BPB is same.

Sometimes when we start our system, we see some error messages like “Non System Disk” or “Disk Error….”. After we fail to load from it and also fail from a floppy boot attempt, the partition becomes unbootable. This situation usually occurs due to the Volume Boot Record corruption. In these circumstances, the particular disk partition become inaccessible and it may lead data loss and you need partition repairing and data recovery to recover your lost data. Microsoft provides the patch of this problem. You can repair your VBR with inbuilt system utility called Fixed Disk Editor by follwing these steps: -

1. Copy the data from a hard drice with the identical OS. There are two approaches for getting the data back.
2. First method is to install the second disk in the computer, restart Micro-Scope, and copy the sectors from healthy to affected hard drive.
3. Second method is to copy the sector to the other storage media and then transfer it to the drive being reconstructed.
4. In either case, the volume boot record is placed at Cylinder 0, Head 1, and Sector 1 on the healthy drive. Copy this data to the same location on the damaged drive. Exit the Fixed Disk Editor.

In this way, by following this method, you can repair or rebuild your VBR, but if you fail to do this, your drive volumes can’t be accessed. These situations may casue loss of all the data stored on the particualr volume or drive partition. In such conditions, to restore your lost data, data recovery software is required.

Data Recovery software will help you in recovering your data. The Data Recovery Software will recover the data from your damaged hard drive and save it to another storage media. You need to install data recoverry software on a healthy system and attach you damaged drive with this system. With this software, you can scan your drive and can restore the data on another hard drive. in case of VBR, you need to use Windows Data Recovery Software.

Booming Industry of Data Recovery

Today computer has become an important part of life for every individual. It has all types of users ranging from general home users to industry professionals. Everyone use computer for storing their important data as it is a stable medium for storing data.

Though computers are very faithful medium of storage, but there is no guarantee that your data is hundred percent secure. Data may loss in computers also due to several reasons including hardware failure, logical error and operating system corruption. These all conditions may lead data loss in computers and you may loss your important data from your dependable storage system.

The role of data recovery industry starts from here to recovery your lost data. It is a very booming industry that provides all type of solutions related to data recovery. There are two sub categories of Data Recovery industry. These are: -

1. Data Recovery Services: - Under this sub category, the industry provide the solutions of data recovery for the physical damaged storage media due to hardware malfunction. The data recovery industry provide the facility of high technical, expert and experienced data recovery professional to recover your lost data.

The internal parts of the drive like platter are very sensitive and can not be recovered in open environment. The industry also provides the facility of dust resistant labs to repair the high sensitive parts of the drive. These labs are known as Clean Rooms.

2. Data Recovery Software: - if your data is lost due to hardware problem, then data recovery service is usable. But when your data is lost due to logical error or operating system corruption, then Data Recovery Software is used. These are the general data recovery utilities that scan the entire drive from which the data is lost and help user to restore them.

The repairing task of the storage media can’t be performed by the general user, but Data Recovery Software can be used by general user. User can use these software without any high technical knowledge.

These are the two methods of recovering data from damaged hard drive or other storage media. The Data Recovery industry provides the Data Recovery solutions for each of the operating system including Window, UNIX, Linux, Macintosh and Novell along with all file systems supported by these operating systems including FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, UFS, VFS, VxFS, Ext2, Ext3, HFS, and HFS+. You can recover data from more than 300 file formats.

Can you recover data from lost MBR ?

The MBR or Master Boot Record is the name of the first addressable sector of the hard drive in the context of Intel Partitioning. The size of MBR is 512 bytes. It contains the partition table on the hard drive in FAT16 and FAT32 File System. It also contains a routing boot whose goal is to load the operating system or boot loader present on the active partition of the drive. The MBR is used for following purposes: -

1. Holding the primary partition table of the hard drive.
2. holding Bootstrapping OS, after the BIOS of the Computer passes execution to machine code instructions contained with MBR.
3. for uniquely identifying individual disk media, with a 16 or 32-bit disk signature, depending on the file system used.

MBR is the important part of your computer that tells the operating system what to boot and from where to boot. It loads the operating system when the system starts. Sometimes when you start your computer, it display some error messages like Boot Failure: System Halted or Operating System Not Found and your system stop booting with a blue Intel screen.
These error occurs when your boot record or MBR gets corrupted and your system can’t boot. Boot record may corrupt due to a number of reasons like improper shut down and virus attack (like trojan boot sector infactor). In such conditions, you can’t access the hard drive of your system and your data may loss. You can repair your MBR with inbuilt system utility called Fixed Disk Editor by follwing these steps: -

1. By using the Fixed Disk Editor, locate and read the first addressable sector of the drive. It is the location of your corrupted boot record.
2. It provide two options, M for modifying the MBR and 0 for rebuilding the MBR. Select the proper option and press ESC key.
3. It will ask you to press W to write and Y to confirm the selection.
4. Close the Fixed Disk Editor and choose the Rebuild Boot Record menu and press Y to confirm the selection.
5. it will rebuild your MBR and now it is corruption free.

In this way you may repair or rebuild your MBR, but if you are unable to do this, your system won’t boot. In such conditions, to rebuild the MBR you need to repartion the disk and it may cause data loss. it is the biggest data loss because your entire hard drive is inaccessible and you lost all of the data stored on it. In such conditions, to recover your lost data, data recovery software is required.

Data Recovery software will help you in recovering your data. The Data Recovery Software will recover the data from your corrupted hard drive and save it to another storage media. You need to install data recovery software on a healthy system and attach you damaged drive with this system. With this software, you can scan your drive and can restore the data on another hard drive. in case of MBR, you need to use Windows Data Recovery Software.

Data Wipe

Hard Drive is a non-volatile storage medium. It stores data permanently. User simply can’t delete data from hard drive permanently. When user deletes a file or directory, it moves in the recycle bin. When you empty the recycle bin, you think that data is deleted forever, but actually data doesn’t delete. Only the name of the files is removes from the index of the disk and data still remain physically on the disk. These data can be recovered with the help of Data Recovery software.

Sometimes you need for a new system for high speed or new hard drive for more storage capacity. In such conditions, if you sell your computer without deleting the existing data on your drive, it may leak your confidential information. In order to keep your information private, permanent data deletion is required. This process is generally required in the computers used in Banks, Army services, and for government records. When these old computers are sold without completely deleting the data, may be very dangerous.

In such conditions, to delete the data permanently, data wiping is required. Data wiping is the process of deleting the data with the help of software. This software is called data wipe. There are many kinds of data wiping software are available in the market. Generally when you delete the data with the combination of Shift + Del key or by emptying the recycle bin, it can be recovered with Data Recovery Software. But there is a drawback of the data recovery software. It can’t recover data if it is being overwritten. This software uses the overwriting technique, so it can’t be recovered with the help of data recovery software.

The data on the surface of the hard drive is stored in the binary form i.e. 0 and 1. This software first write all the data by 1 and then by 0. It repeats the same process for many times. The final overwriting process involves the random distribution of the ones and zeroes on the entire disk. This completely deletes all system files, including administrator data, system registry traces, and Windows logs. This makes the original data on the media unrecoverable. Some data-wiping applications also feature low level format options which could completely sterilize the disk.
Stellar Wipe is such kind of software. It is very powerful and effective data wiping software. You can erase selected files, folders or entire drive with the help of this software. You can also erase internet activities like history, favorites, cookies and temporary files with the help of this software.