E-Volution IT

Data recovery from a crashed hard drive is something no general computer user ever really wants to have to learn about and perform. It’s something most of us only start exploring when something disastrous has happened to our computer—like it just won’t boot any more, or Windows crashes constantly and increasingly often. As an I.T. consultant most of the data recovery I’ve performed, and nearly all the crashed hard drives I’ve worked on has been for clients—both home users and companies—who have had a computer crash.

Over the years I have come across a number of software applications that are really handy to have on hand. Whether you want to revive a dying or seemingly dead hard disk just enough to get your data off before ditching it, or you wish to access a drive that still works yet has become corrupted, these tools are a great help. To save you hours of hunting around on the Internet for the best tools, I’ll list the ones I have used and liked right here.

When the drive is seemingly “dead”

Spinrite

There are a few categories of hard drive failure. Perhaps the worst is when the drive is no long recognised by your operating system. For all intents and purposes the drive is dead. Running many of the available data recovery applications over it is a waste of time because they either don’t even see the drive in your computer, or if they do there’s little that can be done. In this situation the tool I would recommend is call Spinrite. Spinrite has a long history of being a top tool for hard disk recovery and also for crash prevention. Spinrite is a tool professionals use, and yet the price is still relatively low. At present a new license sells for US$89.00—well worth it if it manages to revive your failing disk drive and recover your precious data. Click here to learn more about Spinrite.

When the drive sort of “works” but is going down fast

In this situation I would again recommend Spinrite as a great tool to use. I would first let Spinrite do its thing with the disk, and then use one of the following tools to get all your data off the disk and onto a nice new one. I see Spinrite as a drive recovery / revival tool, and the following applications as data recovery tools. Spinrite, in my opinion, is about the disk and the data on the disk at a very low-level (below the level of the operating system). Spinrite has nothing to do with your operating system—rather it access the disk directly and works its magic at that level. This is why I class it as a disk recovery / revival (and maintenance) application.

The following applications specialise in data recovery. In general (although not always) they assume that the low-level integrity of the disk is still in tack. They are great at rebuilding the MBR (Master boot record), the partition tables, a damaged file structure, and simply bringing back files you deleted by mistake (or even a whole drive you may have formated by mistake).

R-Studio Data Recovery Software

R-Studio is a tool I am still trying out. So far it looks good. I quote the following from their website.

R-Studio is a family of powerful and cost-effective undelete and data recovery software. Empowered by the new unique data recovery technologies, it is the most comprehensive data recovery solution for recovery files from FAT12/16/32, NTFS, NTFS5 (created or updated by Windows 2000/XP/2003), Ext2FS/Ext3FS (LINUX file systems) and UFS1/UFS2 (FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD file systems) partitions. It functions on local and network disks, even if such partitions are formatted, damaged or deleted. Flexible parameter settings give you absolute control over data recovery.

R-Studio comes in a few different flavours. The two most common ones are NTFS and FAT (or both together. The price is US$49.99 for each separately or $79.99 for the two together. You can also buy a Network and Technician license for US$179.99 and US$899.00 respectively.

Runtime Software GetDataBack

GetDataBack comes in two flavours—one for drives formated using FAT and the other for drives formated using NTFS. GetDataBack will work with a drive that the operating system does not recognise, which is a bonus—yet I still recommend using it in combination with Spinrite if the drive is suffering from serious physical failure (as opposed to just data corruption caused by other things). GDB for FAT costs US$69 and for NTFS costs US$79. You can buy them together for US$119.

The following is an intro from the GDB web site on what GDB can do. For full details go to http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm:

Whatever happened to your drive-

GetDataBack will recover your data if the hard drives partition table, boot record, FAT/MFT or root directory are lost or damaged, data was lost due to a virus attack, the drive was formatted, fdisk has been run, a power failure has caused a system crash, files were lost due to a software failure, files were accidentally deleted…

Recover even when Windows doesn’t recognize the drive-

GetDataBack can even recover your data when the drive is no longer recognized by Windows. It can likewise be used even if all directory information - not just the root directory- is missing.

Get everything back-

Advanced algorithms will make sure that all directories and sub directories are put together as they were, and that long file names are reconstructed correctly.

GetDataBack is safe-

GetDataBack is read-only, meaning the program will never attempt to write to the drive you are about to recover. Please make sure to read the safety instructions…

GetDataBack is easy to use-

The software enables the regular user to conduct his own data recovery by guiding him through three easy to understand steps, thus gives the advanced user the possibility to interfere with the recovery and improve the results, by examining the scan log, the file system details, file and directory information, by selecting the sector range to be scanned, by choosing excessive search for file systems or search for lost files, by calling Runtime’s DiskExplorer.

Crash Prevention / Disk Maintenance

There are various tools available that claim to let you know when your drive is starting to fail. I am not overly familiar with any of them so I shall leave it to you to do your own research into what’s on offer. Most of these tools are working with the SMART system built into most of the newer drives. Often SMART does not get activated by the BIOS for whatever reason, so these tools will activate it the first time you run them, and then start monitoring the data produced by SMART.

I mentioned that Spinrite can also be used for disk maintenance, and it can. This involves running Spinrite in its “maintenance” mode every now and then. Perhaps every few months or so. If you are keen to ensure your disks stay in top condition and to have an early warning of possible drive failure I suggest using Spinrite for maintenance, and possibly using a SMART monitoring tool. The SMART tool will run in the background whenever you are using your computer. I am sure there are many free tools that perform this task which are just as good as the ones you can pay for. Do some research to find out for yourself.

Technorati : computer crash, data recovery, disk recovery
Del.icio.us : computer crash, data recovery, disk recovery
Ice Rocket : computer crash, data recovery, disk recovery