About Data Recovery

Data recovery is associated with the process of regaining any damaged or corrupted computer data that was stored on a disk, drive or tape. Corrupted data can occur due to a variety of damage such as fire, water, magnetic damage or just due to errors, both Physical damage and Logical damage. For more information: Understanding Data Loss. Data recovery specialists and software can help recover any data that is still available.

Every day, all over the world, thousands of computer users lose their data to some sort of hard drive failure, electronic malfunction, accidental formatting or a natural disaster of some sort. Whether you've lost every bit of financial data, business contacts, that 900 page novel you've been working on for years or the hundreds of photos you took of your first born, it can feel like a tragedy of massive proportion.

So, when it's gone, is it really gone? Is there anything that can be done about it?

Whatever happened to your data - whether files were accidentally deleted, a virus has wiped out the boot record, the drive was formatted or fdisked or even is no longer recognized by the operating system, as long as it wasn't physically overwritten, the data which was on the drive is still there.

The files just aren't accessible anymore the way they should be. For example, if you delete a file, the file's data is not deleted from the drive, but instead a signature byte is set at the start of the file's file name. This signature byte tells the operating systems that this area can be overwritten by other data next. And that's exactly what happens. The next time you write something to the drive, the new data will be written to the so marked area. But this also means, that as long as nothing new is written to the drive, the data is still there, intact and can therefore be recovered.

This behavior is also the reason why trying to undelete single deleted files often isn't successful. When you delete a file - and you empty the recycle bin as well - as soon as you notice that you still need the file, chances are that you have done something in the meantime, that has overwritten the data area of the file.

When you have formatted your drive from FAT32 to NTFS - all of your files are still there. When you format a FAT32 drive, everything is destroyed (the boot record, the FAT, the root directory) except for the partition table and the data. And that's all you need! As long as the data's still there your files can be reconstructed - very often nearly perfectly.

When your data disappeared, never install or copy anything to the drive you want to recover data from. If you can avoid it, don't even run the drive anymore. Run it only one more time, after you have attached it to a healthy Windows computer as a second drive, installed the data recovery software on the "good" drive, and are running the software to scan the "bad" drive.

Writing anything to the drive you have the data loss on, can destroy the whole recovery. Installing a seemingly tiny 1MB program on the drive can mean that you are not only overwriting 1MB of space on the drive, but are corrupting 100MB or more worth of files beyond recovery.

If you lost data due to a physical problem with the drive, i.e. the drive is making strange noises, doesn't spin at all, or is no longer recognized by the BIOS, this might be the case. When a hard drive is physically damaged no software solution usually is going to bring your data back. We recommend that you to not even try to recover your data yourself in these cases, because each time you run a damaged drive could be last time it is running at all. The best way to get data back is to send your hard disk drive to local data recovery manufacturer.

When you still feel tempted to try to recover a physically challenged drive yourself, at least - before you do anything else - make an image of the drive and run all data recovery attempts on the image.

But for all data loss scenarios due to logical failures like accidental file deletion, format, fdisk, software or power failure, user error, virus attack etc. the following is true:

Don't try to use any repair tools, like "bad sector repair", "Scandisk" or "Chkdsk" tools, whatever is out there. These tools are writing to your drive, and in the process are likely to overwrite the very files you intend to recover. For more information read cautionary Scandisk and Chkdsk hard disk notes.

Instead use data recovery tools, which don't write to the drive, such as the Data Recovery Wizard. Make sure to use the data recovery software as recommended. Never install or copy anything to the drive you are about to recover. Instead attach the drive to a working Windows computer as a second or slave drive and run the software from the "good" computer. If you need assistance, read this article. It's important that you use this page as an installation reference only. You can also contact the drive manufacturer for assistance with installing their drive as a slave (secondary) device.

By all means, BACKUP YOUR DATA!

Common problems related to data loss and solutions

• How do I recover deleted file(s) and folder(s)?
• How do I recover missing or lost logical drives?
• How do I recover formatted logical drives?
• How do I recover Fdisked drives?
• How do I recover lost file(s) and folder(s)?
• How do I recover repartitioned (such as Partition Magic resize partition error) drives?
• How do I recover hard disks involving Scandisk and Chkdsk?
• How do I Recover 'Ghosted' (or 'imaged') hard disk drives?
• How do I recover Raw Drive?
• How do I recover Encrypted Data on NTFS Partition?
• How do I recover Compressed Data on NTFS Partition?
• Raid Drive Recovery Overview
• Professional Data Recovery Software: Data Recovery Wizard