Archive for the ‘Data Recovery Info’ Category
18th January 2008
FAT32 file recovery? Why would I need that? Ninety nine point nine percent of all file systems that reside on XP and Vista are NTFS 5. Why in the world would someone take the time and effort to develop a free piece of software to recover files from FAT32. I can think of three reasons.
The first reason would be this. Have you ever bought an external USB drive? You know, Maxtor One Touch, Seagate Free Agent, and the like. These drives more often than not are formatted FAT32. The reason they are formatted in this manner is that, Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Macintosh will read and write to FAT32 drives. In other words, as smart marketing geniuses formatting in FAT32 opens up the market.
Secondly, flash drives for your cameras have gotten much larger. They used to be formatted in FAT12, or FAT16, however the size of the flash card has exceeded the maximum cluster size that these file systems will address. For instance FAT16, will only access four gigabytes.
The final reason consists of file recovery technology. The very first piece of data recovery software I ever wrote was for FAT12, and FAT16. FAT32 did not exist. Data storage was at a high cost and a 30 MB hard drive would cost as much as $1000.00. Since this was the arena we had to work in, data recovery had to be performed ‘on-disk’. In other words, you did not go out and buy storage to retrieve your deleted files to. Data recovery software had to be done in place on the file system that was damaged, without destroying the data on the drive. A pretty neat trick. I was one of the pioneers of this technology. The ability to fix a file system without destroying the in place file system, as well as the data.
As storage became cheaper, a new technology was developed. Reading a damaged file system and moving the data to a different medium became popular, and still is to this day. This technology is infinitely easier to develop for, and has the illusion of safety. However, there are still many end users who will copy files back to the original drive. They will download a piece of software onto the damaged file system and run it from that same file system. These things defeat the purpose of moving your data off of the offending file system and onto a clean file system.
In a perfect world a piece of data recovery software would have its own operating system, run from CD, and have the capability to examine any file system regardless of type. It would be able to repair the file system in place, never touching the existing file system. Nirvana. I didn’t write this kind of software, but the offering I do have may be interesting.
Free FAT32 Undelete pretty much says it all. If you have a FAT32 file system, that is intact, but you deleted some files and want them back, then this free piece of software may be for you. The software may be placed on a floppy or CD as it is only 56 K. It must be run under Windows NT type operating system, but it does not have to be run from the drive where the files have been deleted. You can download the free FAT 32 data recovery software by going to our USB External Hard Drive Data Recovery page.
18th January 2008
I more then likely average about 3 to 4 calls a day from people who have formatted and reinstalled their operating system. Usually by using the manufactures (i.e. Dell) system restore feature, not realizing that this will bring the machine back to the way it was when purchased. All of the data that was on this drive now seems to be gone forever.But this is not the case; most of the data should still be fairly intact. You will have to use what is called a file harvester, or raw data scan, piece of software in order to find these files. The way these pieces of software work, is they start at the beginning of a hard drive and begin to scan looking for unique file header information. These file headers, are unique to the type of file (i.e. JPG is FF D8 FF E0) and therefore the software can try to “piece” the drive back together. If you have defragged your hard disk recently there is a much higher recovery rate because there will be no trash data in your file. If you have not defragged, the likelihood of recovery diminishes greatly, because the software you are using can not tell where a file starts and ends, if it is fragmented.
So I still have not explained what Defragging does. In a perfect world when we wrote data to our drive we would never delete it, but that is just not the case. As we delete files and add files there is “empty” spaces left on our hard drives. These spaces have actual data in them but it is no longer part of any file. As we go forward with normal pc use, we continue to cause the drive to be fragmented and not contiguous. Running Windows defrag on a weekly basis will up the performance of your machine, free space on your hard disk, and leave you in a better data recovery situation should that happen to you. Windows Defrag will move your files around to make them contiguous and therefore more easily accessed by Windows. You can schedule a weekly defrag by following the directions below.
How To Schedule a Weekly Defrag:
Click on the Start Menu and go to the control panel.
Now click on Performance and Maintenance
Once in that screen click on the Scheduled Tasks option
Now double click on Add Scheduled Task
Then Click Next
Click Browse, and now let’s go to the windows/system32 folder, and select defrag.exe, and click Open
Now use the wizard to set a schedule for when to run the defrag.exe program.
When you are asked for your password be sure to enter it, and click next.
Check Open advanced properties for this task when I click Finish box, and then click finished.
The following window will pop up.
In the RUN text box add the drive you are wishing to run Defrag on, in most cases this will be C:, to the end of the line.
Click ok and your computer should run defrag on your main hard drive once a week! This will make it better for anyone who might need to perform hard drive data recovery on your hard drive.
18th January 2008
This is a tutorial from Jacqui Best about the proper procedure for slaving your hard drive prior to running data recovery software on it. This would also be the procedure to follow if you were to run speed clone to sector clone a noisy drive or if you have a partition problem and need to repair or recover data from a partition or if you need to restore or undelete a file.
It is very important to not download data recovery software directly to the effected hard drive. If you don’t have a second drive or don’t have either a USB drive or USB capable data recovery software, then you must hook the drive up as a slave to run the software.
Case Study: How to “Slave” your Hard Drive
In data recovery it is NEVER a good idea to install, copy, surf the internet, reboot the machine, or do ANYTHING on the hard drive you are now trying to recover the data from. I often tell customer they need to Slave the hard disk to another computer, or put it in a USB chassis. What is difficult is the fact that the average home user has no idea how to do this, and it can be a very daunting task.
The following is a step by step walk through, with pictures on how to remove a hard drive from a computer, slave it to another and then be able to do a safe recovery of the hard drive.
Tools needed: Phillips head screwdriver and a marker.
Step 1: Shut the PC down and unplug the power.
Step 2: Let’s take a look at the back of the computer and see that we need to unscrew and do in order to get the case open. It varies from model to model, so I am showing you on a standard tower case. You will see that there are screws holding on the side panels of the computer. You will need to remove both sides of the tower in order to free the hard drive.
After you remove the sides you will have a front and a back so to speak.
Front
Back
Step 3: While looking in the front we are going to locate and remove the hard drive. You will see below that the hard disk is located near the bottom of the drive chassis in side (the pink area I have highlighted). This is usually the case for most computers.
Step 4: We are going to need to remove the screws from the front and then go around the back of the pc and remove the screws on that side also.
Front Screws
Back Screws
NOTE: there is USUALLY a way to access these screws from the back. If there is not, I would contact, you local computer store fro help as it can become an issue of having to remove the motherboard and other peripherals.
Step 5: Now I want you to remove the power from the Hard Disk. This is a small cable with one red wire two black wires and a yellow wire running into a white connector. Be gentle and slowly pull the cable out, it may be a tight fit so usually slowly rocking it left and right will help remove it.
After you have unplugged it, take a marker and put a mark on it, this will help you to know which one to use when you put the drive back later.
Step 6: Here comes one of the hardest parts, removing the hard drive from the chassis. You are going to want to try and push, any cables in the way of the rear of the drive, up and out of the way. Firmly grab the back and top of the hard drive and pull back to free it.
PLEASE do this gingerly as you do not want to damage any other internal components.
Step 7: Now that the hard drive is free, Flip the hard drive over so that you are looking at the “green board” take you marker and make an arrow that is pointing to the power. This will help you to know which connector to use and which way it is supposed to be plugged into the drive.
Step 8: Holding the hard drive firmly, grab the cable and pull it out. This is another one of those tight cables. Be patient and careful, you don’t want to snap any of the pins off or break the cable.
Step 9: Ok so now we have the hard drive free from the computer, we need to set it to be a slave in the computer you are moving it to. If you take a look at the back of the hard drive there will be a set of pins usually located between the power and hard drive cables.
Now here is the tricky part.
Since Seagate owns Maxtor and Western Digital is the next most popular hard drive I will cover a Maxtor and Western Digital drives for how to set jumpers. (Almost all manufactures keep the jumper setting on the top of the drive on the label) Western Digital: If you look at the green board you will see that near those pins there are labels CS SLAVE MASTER PM2. You are going to want to put the jumper (which should be there already) on SLAVE.
Seagate/Maxtor: This manufacturer is the exact opposite of Western Digital. When you want to make a drive a slave you must make sure there is no jumper on the first set of pins next to the hard drive cable. Maxtor/Seagate have a very clear diagram on the top of their hard drives to explain how to set up as slave.
Step 10: Now that you have made the drive a slave, you can now move it to another computer, to attempt recovery. To do so please start by repeating steps 1 and 2 from above.
Step 11: Ok now another tricky part, putting the drive into the other computer. (for the sake of this walkthrough I am just re-inserting the drive into the same computer)What we need to do is now put the drive into an empty bay in the computer. And put one screw into the side. This is just to hold it in place while you do the recovery.
Step 12: Now find the hard drive cable coming off the hard drive that was already in the machine. To avoid a very lengthy explanation, I am just going to have you disconnect the cable from the hard drive. While looking at the cable you are going to want to connect the very end to the drive you are attempting to recover and the second from the end to original hard drive in the machine.
Step 13: Now connect a free power connector to the hard drive.
NOTE: if you do not have a free power plug you may need to buy a power splitter from your local PC Company.
The image below is what everything should look like when you have connected all the cables.
Step 14: Now replace the sides of the computer, and plug it back in. You should be able to boot into Windows now and attempt recovery.
18th January 2008
DTI Data (DTI) has a unique revenue solution for qualified partners. DTI’s Value Added Reseller (VAR) program enables computer consultants, repair/upgrade facilities, network consultants, and other IT professionals to immediately create a new progressive revenue model.The VAR classification was designed for IT practitioners who currently have an expertise doing business on the Internet. DTI is expanding its Global Network of solutions/service providers.Value Added Reseller Partner Membership Criteria
- Derive at least 30% of total revenues from professional services.
- Have a professional, outbound, trained sales, business development and/or consulting services organization.
- Have the infrastructure and technical expertise to provide front-line, pre-sales support for DTI Services.
- Have the ability and infrastructure to resell DTI Maintenance Contracts (MC) and Service Level Agreements (SLA).
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- Offer value added services such as pre-sales consulting and post-sales first level support.
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Benefits of the DTI Global VAR Challenge
- Receive 10% commission for every data recovery service forwarded or referred to DTI that results in a revenue stream for DTI.
- Receive 15% of initial deposit on MC, and 7.5% residual payments quarterly.
- Guaranteed, regular commission payment shall be payable net 45 days once DTI receives payment for
SLA’s, MC, or data recovery.
- Generate revenue without having to provide or invest in service or overhead.
- Provide additional services and added value to your customers.
- Provide emergency help to your customers in need of a critical data recovery solution.
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- Eligibility for joint marketing activities
- Usage rights to the DTI Global Alliance logo
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- Access to non-publicly published white papers available only to Exchange Server Technology Partners.
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To begin the application process, send the following information to sales@dtidata.com
First Name:
Last Name:
E-Mail:
Preferred Language:
Company Name:
Company URL:
Your Title:
City and State in US:
Country and City outside of US:
Phone:
You will receive a phone call to set up a telephone or an online interview if you have web conferencing technology.
18th January 2008
DTI Data is proud to be partnered with Rackspace. We have hosted our own web sites with Rackspace for the last few years and know of no other hosting company that offers such support. As a data recovery company our hosting needs are quite advanced. We need application servers for remote recovery, where GigaBytes of data are transfered over the Internet at any given time.
Our Exchange Server Data Recovery division utilize Rackspace servers to send clients their recovered PST files. Even during our busiest times of data transfer, Rackspace has never let us down. They offer the best in service and customer satisfaction.
If you or your company needs manged servers, give us a call at 727-345-9665 to speak to a representitive about Rackspace hosting options.
Hre are just some of the reasons to choose Rackspace:
- Fanatical Support
- Direct access to certified experts 24×7×365
- Red Hat Linux or Microsoft Windows
- Full Suite of Managed Services Available
- Zero-Downtime Network
- Guaranteed 1-Hour Hardware Replacement
- Instant Emergency Ticket Response
- Multiple Tier-1 Bandwidth Providers
