Hardrive Recovery

2007-04-17 10:41:55

( Computers )



Hardrive recovery is the process of retrieving and salvaging deleted or damaged data from your computer’s hard drive.

File Deletion
When you delete a file, it does not mean that the data is already gone. What the operating system does is it removes the pointer to that file and converts the allocated space to free space, allowing new data to overwrite the old data. If new data has not overwritten the old data yet, it can still be recovered by different hardrive recovery software. Data that has been overwritten, however, cannot be retrieved. Theories have been proposed on how this process can be accomplished using electron microscopes and image analysis; however, these processes are prone to error and are time-consuming, and have not been proven to work.

Data Damage
Data damage can either be physical or logical. Physical damage refers to damage to your hardware or any storage device; logical damage, on the other hand, refers to damage to your file system, preventing the data from being accessed by your computer’s operating system. Logical damage is more common, and is usually caused by power surges, leading to system crashes and loss of data.

Most operating systems also provide supplemental repair programs for their file systems. These computer recovery tools work by doing consistency checks, which scans the hard disk’s structure and ensures that it is consistent with the specifications, or by rebuilding the entire file system, which allows data to be extracted from the undamaged sectors. These data recovery software, however, are not fool-proof; the recovery program may crash and data loss may still occur.

If you find out that your data has been deleted or damaged and you are unable to recover it using the operating system’s repair tools, various hardrive recovery companies are available to aid in restoring your data. These companies typically have cleanroom facilities that protect your media during repairs.


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