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Data Recovery Tutorials
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This section is designed to assist users with common data recovery procedures. It gives a step by step guide and highlights certain approaches that can be used with different types of data recovery.
For many data recovery requirements, the wizard will guide the user through all stages until files are recovered. For more complex recovery requirements, it is necessary to use the 'Manual' mode. This page points to many common scenarios for data recovery.
It is always worth while starting with the Wizard, as it will do a simple media test, and a simple logical structure test. These tests will give a very good indication of whether the media is physically sound, and logically sound, or if there are detected problems.
Stage 1
With any recovery it is essential to know if the media being read is physically OK. If the Wizard test comes up with physical errors, or there is any concern about the drive, then it is best to make an image of the drive. The major upside of this is that bad sectors are only read once, and so the recovery procedure is much much faster, and if the drive is failing, then as much data as possible is preserved for logical recovery. The downside is that a data area, the size of the drive is required to make an image. Thus a 320GB drive will require another drive of at least the same physical size. The image is made as a file, and so can be on any logical storage device, such as a local drive, USB drive, or an external RAID. For details on imaging, see the chapter on Image and Raw Recovery
Stage 2
The next stage is to determine, if not known, exactly what type of media is being handled. For disks it is normally an NTFS, FAT, or HPFS (Mac) disk. This is typically controlled by the boot sector, and partition table
Partition and boot sector problems
FAT, NTFS and Mac
NTFS recovery
HP Mediavault
Camcorder
Photo recovery