Archive for the ‘Data Recovery Info’ Category
27th December 2007
There are a lot of websites and blogs that talk about hard drive recovery. Most of the content out there is really just fluff, written to drive hard drive and data recovery type ads in Google AdSense. These ads can make webmasters and site owners a lot of money. The problem is there is quite a bit of hard drive recovery content that is down right dangerous! Sites that say you should put your hard drive in a freezer or even open your hard drive at all, don’t know anything about how hard drives work, let alone how to recover or repair them.
The Hard Drive Recovery Process
Hard drive recovery is the process of recovering data from a physically damaged hard disk. More than half of the drives we receive have head failures which require that the drive is opened inside our clean room which prevents dust particles from damaging the drive further. The clean room is also used to protect the electronic parts of the drive from static discharge. Opening a hard drive in anything but a clean room is dangerous to the hard drive. Below is a diagram that shows the parts in a hard drive.
DTI Data Recovery is one of a handful of data recovery companies that have both a clean room AND engineers that are capable of programming software that is needed to repair a file system. The head of our programming department, Dick Correa, has been writing file system repair and data recovery software for many years. His technicians are constantly doing research and development on how to work with all file systems, not just NTFS. By combining advanced programming and having the tools necessary to perform hard drive recovery, DTI is an industry leader in data recovery services.
The reason that we are getting into all of this now is to help users identify legitimate resources when their hard drives have failed. Don’t trust just anyone with your data. Make sure the company you choose is like DTI Data, that they have a clean room and qualified engineers to perform hard drive recovery.
If you are here you need data recovery, more than likely, internal hard disk repair. Call Toll Free: 1-866-438-6932 or fill out an online quote form if you need hard drive recovery.
27th December 2007
This is just a mini tutorial on how to uninstall software you no longer want or need and is taking up valuable room on your hard disk.
So, step by step this is what you need to do.
1. Click Start
2. After the start menu pops open you will need to click on the control panel option. (See the screen grab below for the location)
3. Now when you click on the control panel you will be presented with one of 2 different screens. With either screen you are going to want to click on Add or Remove Programs. (see images below)
4. When you choose this option a new window will open that might take several minutes to fully populate depending on how much software you have installed.
5. Once all of your software is listed you can scroll the list in order to find any software you no longer need. Once you select the software you will be given the option to remove it.
(NOTE you may have a button that says CHANGE/REMOVE this is essence the same thing as remove only button)
6. Most software will ask you if you are sure you want to remove it. (NOTE: Most software programs also delete any saved data associated with them when you remove the files.)
7. The next phase you will see the machine deleting the files, and then you will be back where you can select other programs you wish to remove.
27th December 2007
We have been getting a lot of calls about RAID data recovery lately. As more and more computer manufacturers utilize RAID systems in home computers, RAID failures rise exponentially. It used to be that RAID data recovery calls that we received were large companies, that were running massive multi drive arrays. It stands to reason that a large company can afford the costs associated with RAID data recovery.
RAID Data Recovery Costs
To most consumers, the costs for RAID data recovery will seem rather high, but since the majority of RAID systems that we are seeing are RAID 0 which are 2 drives that are “striped” or combined to create 1 volume. This increases performance, but is also dangerous. The fact is if a RAID 0 fails, both drives must be repaired to recover the data. That is why RAID data recovery is expensive to a consumer.
28th November 2007
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.
28th November 2007
We have a really great piece of data recovery software called E-Recovery For Outlook Express, that will restore deleted emails. The software is very easy to use, you just select the email folder the emails were deleted from and then we show you what we see for recovery.
NOTE: If you have deleted the actual “Inbox” or any other folder then you will need file undelete software like DART Undelete for Windows XP and Vista or Fast File Undelete for older systems.
Now the reason I am bringing up this data recovery software is because I had a few customers call and tell me they could not find emails more then a few days old or a month old. So in order to set the background, you have to understand that each one of those folders is a mini database file on your hard drive. As you send and receive emails those folders grow.
Eventually, you will open Outlook Express one day and it will ask you if you want to compress older data. Windows makes this all sound very appealing, like it is going to make everything work better. The truth is that yes the files will be smaller and maybe Outlook Express with run a little faster, but in the event one of the DBX files gets corrupt, data recovery will be next to impossible because the compression is different from DBX to DBX based on the data being compressed. For this same reason E-Recovery can only see emails that have not been compressed.
