Partition Recovery
Hard drives in recent years have become home to crucial documents and valuable belongings, such as music and movies. Users are placing more and more importance on the data they have stored in their hard drive, trusting that this device will keep their information safe. Although hard drive sizes and speed have increased dramatically, reliability is still a major concern. Add to that the very real possibility of damaging viruses, or even human error, and the hard drive is not as safe as it may have seemed.
The data on a hard drive may become inaccessible for a number of reasons. A mechanical failure is a common cause of hard drive malfunctions, but there are many other potential factors as well. Modern operating systems must have a portion of the disk set aside known as the partition table. This area of the hard drive acts as a directory for the rest of the data on the disk. There can be several of these partitions on a single hard drive. Data is frequently lost when a partition is accidentally deleted.
Luckily, when a partition is deleted the actual data is usually left intact. Although the partition table itself has been removed, the data it referred to remains. Recovering this data is a matter of restoring the original partition table, so that the operating system can find and read the contents of the partition. There are many free tools available on the internet that can effectively do this job.
TestDisk is a time tested utility released under the GNU Public License, and is free to the public. Using TestDisk, you can easily perform a partition recovery, bringing back data lost on that partition. TestDisk is capable of partition recovery whenever software or human error was involved. Hardware errors, such as a burnt out reading head, cannot be corrected with any software.
In the case of a hardware error, the damage may be of varying extent. The simplest and easiest hardware problem to correct involves a bad logic circuit. If an identical model number and firmware version drive can be found, then the bad logic board can be easily replaced. This is the best case scenario. More serious problems include the failure of the read head, in which case you will most likely hear a scratching sound when the drive attempts to spin up.
A failure of the read head is a problem that can only be corrected in a lab, and even there, only a segment of the data may be recoverable. Software issues, however, can almost always be corrected from home with free or very affordable utilities. This applies even to partition recovery, as mentioned before, or even more serious issues such as accidental formatting. Even when a drive is formatted, the original data remains, but has simply been marked as fair game for overwriting
Filed under: Partition Recovery