Starting Exchange Server with a blank Information Store

Starting Exchange Server with a blank Information Store

There are some situations where starting Microsoft Exchange with a blank database may be necessary. In my line of work, I run across a large amount of businesses that have had their Exchange Private Information Store corrupted and the whole organizations Email capabilities halted as well. Quite often, getting the users back up and running takes precedence over getting the data back. Don’t get me wrong; the data is still extremely important, however not having email capability can stop some businesses day to day operations dead in their tracks.

In a perfect world, there would and should be a backup Exchange server just waiting to take over in case of a catastrophic event. But in reality, that is rarely the case. Rather than wait a complete day or two, or even longer, for the systems administrator to get the Exchange database recovered, a viable alternative is to restart the information store with a blank database and import the data back in when it is recovered.

There may be other reasons for wanting to create a blank database as well. You may have an Exchange server that is years old, with tons of residual data from users no longer at the company. You may need to free up disk space on your server. You may have a database with minor corruption and decide to ExMerge your data out and import it back in to a clean corruption-free database. Whatever the reason, make sure you have a complete plan of action and be sure to backup your data in case you run into difficulties. The following article explains how to create a new database with Exchange Server.

To start Exchange Server with a blank Information Store:

1. Locate the Exchange database directory and transaction log directory
   1. Open Exchange System Manager
   2. Navigate to Administrative Groups->First Administrative Group->Servers->servername
   3. Underneath servername click First Storage Group and then Action->Properties
   4. Transaction Log location will be listed on the General tab. Note this location (Image 1d)
   5. Navigate under First Storage Group to your Mailbox Store and click Action->Properties
   6. Click the Database tab to note the Exchange Database and Exchange Streaming Database locations (Image 1f)
   7. Do the same for the Public Store

Image 1d	Image 1f

2. Stop the Exchange Information Store (IS) if it is currently running
   1. Click on Start->Programs->Administrative Tools and then on Services or you can go to Computer Management by Right-Clicking on My Computer and choosing “Manage”

      i. If using Computer Management, drill down to Services and Applications, and then Services underneath that

   2. In the right window of the Services or Computer Management console, locate Microsoft Exchange Information Store
   3. If it’s status is listed as “Started”, Right-Click it and choose “Stop” (Image 2c)
   4. It may give you a message stating that dependency services such as Microsoft Exchange Event will need to stop as well. Choose “Yes” to continue stopping the IS

Image 2c

3. Rename database and transaction log directories and create new ones
   1. Rename the database location MDBDATA directory to MDBDATA-old (Image 3a)
   2. Create a new MDBDATA directory
   3. Rename the transaction log MDBDATA directory to MDBDATA-old (if location is different from the database location)
   4. Create a new MDBDATA directory for the transaction logs (Image 3d)

Image 3a	Image 3d

4. Start the Exchange Information Store service
5. Create new data files
   1. From Exchange System Manager navigate to Administrative Groups->First Administrative Group->Servers->servername->First Storage Group
   2. Click on the Mailbox Store and then on Action->Mount Store (Image 5b)
   3. You will receive a message stating that mounting this store will force the creation of an empty database, choose “Yes” to continue (Image 5c)
   4. The Store should mount, give you a message stating it successfully mounted and the data files should be created in the MDBDATA directory. (Images 5d1 & 5d2)
   5. Follow the same steps for the Public database

 

 

Image 5b
Image 5c
Image 5d1	Image 5d2

6. Test and Verify
   1. Verify the data files were created in the MDBDATA directory
   2. Check the Event Log for any errors
   3. Test connection to the Exchange server from Outlook

MFT Data Recovery

   Over the years I have recovered many drives configured with NTFS.  One of the leading reasons that data recovery is performed on these hard drives is an anamoly developed in the Master File Table.  This area of the drive is the single most important set of data stored on your system.  The Master File Table houses all attributes, as well as cluster placement for every file on your system.  It contains security attributes, file name attributes, date and time signatures, and a mini FAT called a run list that points to every cluster where a  particular file is stored.

  In addition to the infomation stored in the Master File Table it has been my experience that if a previous copy of the Master File Table had been saved off into a file onto a remote site I could have easily imported that file and used it to recover the data.  In other words, it is rarely the occasion that an entire file system gets totally wiped out.  It is usually some small piece of information either corrupted or omitted from the Master File Table that causes the problem.  Even a restore disk used on a hard drive that totally destroys all remnants of a file system cannot keep a backup copy of the Master File Table from recovering some data.

  How, you may ask can this be?  Well grasshopper, read on and see.  Imagine a book.  A reference book preferably.  Now, let us define the attributes of a reference  book.  Lets see, there is a forward where the author may offer a few remarks so we know how intelligent he is.  There is a table of contents that give you a general idea of what is in the book and where it is located. There is the body of the book, the actual information.  Last but not least, an index.  A detailed description, with page numbers that tell you exactly where the data is that you are looking for. For illustration purposes we can  say that the index of the book is the Master File Table, and the body of the book is the data on your hard drive.  If the index of the book is ripped out of the back, how would it be possible to find the information you are looking for?  I suppose you could wade through the entire book and possibly, after several hours of searching, find the answers you are looking for.  I have done that with some of my older books where the back, and the front of the book have disappeared.   A book may have 200, 300, 400, maybe even 500 pages to look through, and if the information is important enough it is worth the look.  However, wouldn’t it have been easier if I would have just photo copied the index and placed that in a nice safe place.  Then, when the book gets old, and I lose the index, I have this nice copy that I have kept to help me find my information.

   Leafing through a 500 page book may be time consuming but it is feasible, however, apply that same logic of the index and the book to a hard drive.  Who wants to scan through 234,000,000 sectors looking for data.  If the data is fragmented then the data is probably lost.  Wouldn’t have been nice to have a copy of the Master File Table to use and find all of your old tax returns, or doctoral thesis, or the only pictures of your grandsons birth?  I would say, “Yeah!! It would’ve been nice!”. 

  Please don’t get the wrong idea.  This is not the same as entire backup, on another set of media.  There are holes to this system.  First, if the drive actually goes bad, then it will be difficult if not impossible to get the data back.  Secondly, any thing that writes to the data portion of the drive will make the Master File Table useless. However, it takes a long time to destroy a 250 GB  hard drives data area.  Lastly, I have not been able to find a piece of software that just dumps the Master File Table to a remote site.  Looks like someone should write one?

Information to Have Ready When You Call DTIData.com Software Technical Support

Here is a list of things to have ready when you call for technical support, this is in order to try and make the experience a little nicer. Most people who call me are very frustrated already, due to the loss of data, and I find that sometimes that frustration is enhanced when they are unable to answer my questions.

1. Be at the computer with the problem when you call.
2. Know what operating system the computer is running
3. Know how many partitions the hard drive has.
4. Make a mental not of what happened to the drive and the steps you have taken to get the data back.
5. Know which pieces of hard drive recovery software you have run on the hard drive
6. If it is a memory card you are trying to recover, be sure it is mounting as a mass storage device. This means either in a camera that mounts like a hard drive, or in a card reader.
7. If this is a Raid, make sure you let the technician know that ahead of time, data on Raids is written differently the data on a non raid drive.
8. Make sure you have administrative rights to the computer you are trying to recover.
9. Have a pen and paper ready, in case the technician has a list of steps they would like for you to perform.
10. Write down any errors you have received, I will be asking you.
11. If you have taken the machine to a computer repair shop, what they told you and that they did would be helpful to know.

I hope this helps make things a little easier, and of course if you have none of the above I will still be able to help!

FREE NTFS Partition Repair Data Recovery Software

Hey Everyone! Thanks for all the positive emails and phone calls. One email from Jim L in Dallas Texas asks: “you talk about partition repair, but the software doesn’t actually repair the partition, it recovers files from it. Is there anything out there that does repair partitions?” Well Jim while most people are happy to just get their data back from a damaged partition, we do have a tool for those brave souls that want to actually REPAIR a partition.

Dick Correa our chief programmer was kind enough to release a tool he created that does in fact REPAIR NTFS partitions. This software is free to our readers and can be gotten off of our website. The link is at the bottom of this post. Keep in mind that DTI is not responsible for any data lost from misuse of this tool. It is extremely powerful. Now that the lawers are happy, here is Dick’s post:

NTFS Partition Recovery with Free Partition RecoveryAll things must start somewhere, when it comes to operating systems’; the partition sector is the single most important component in the boot sequence. When the partition sector is missing, corrupt, or set up improperly it can wreak havoc with the booting of your operating system. The partition sector is vulnerable to virus attacks, operating system anomalies, bad sector reads, and an ever increasing set of tools, fdisk included, that when used incorrectly can and will totally destroy an operating systems boot sequence.

In order to more clearly understand how the partition sector fits into the boot sequence, the following is a standard garden variety boot up.

When you turn on your computer several things happen. The first of which is the BIOS (Basic Input Output System) is executed by the CPU (Central Processing Unit). The CPU knows to load the BIOS on power up as there is a flag set at power on. The BIOS then jumps to a set of routines that will execute the POST (Power On Self Test). The POST will look at memory, some peripheral devices, and do some other house keeping procedures. The most important of these is determining the boot device. The boot device is stored in non-volatile read/write memory. If the boot device is set to a hard drive, then an industry standard interrupt 0×19 is called. This routine loads the first 512 bytes of the boot device, which in this case the hard drive, into memory location 0×7C00. The 512 bytes is a standard sector size. It then jumps to that address (0×7C00) and executes whatever it finds there.

If all goes well, the set of instructions executed will look at the partition entry data. The partition entry data is used to determine which partition is the boot partition. If it finds a boot partition in the partition entry list the instructions will then load a secondary set of instructions which the partition entry has pointed to. In the case of Windows the OS (Operating System) pre loader is now loading itself into memory. This type of OS loader is called a two phase loader and is very common. Take a look at the table below to help better understand the role of the partition sector entry data.

The format of a partition sector entry is as follows:
1.) Byte 1 Boot Partition Indicator (0×80 is bootable, 0×00 is not)

2.) Byte 2 Starting Head of the partition (255 or less)

3.) Byte 3-4 Starting Sector and Cylinder of the partition
This is set up as 10 bits for the Cylinder and
6 bits for the Sector (Sector Max 63, Cylinders Max 1024)

4.) Byte 5 File System Type (NTFS, FAT32 etc)

5.) Byte 6 Ending Head of the partition (255 or less)

6.) Byte 7-8 Ending Sector and Cylinder of the partition
This is set up as 10 bits for the Cylinder and
6 bits for the Sector (Sector Max 63, Cylinders Max 1024)

7.) Bytes 9 -12 Relative Sector to the partition sector. In other
words, where the actual partition starts.

8.) Bytes 13-16 Total sectors for this partition.

If any of this data is outside the stated parameters the partition will fail and consequently the boot sequence will stop. In order to clearly understand what happens when the partition sector is corrupt or damaged, the following is a list of scenarios.1. Boot Failure: System Halted
An error message that comes from the BIOS. Certain BIOS versions, especially the most recent revisions, take a look at the partition sector. The BIOS will perform some preliminary tests and one of the tests is the Partition Identifier. At the end of every partition sector is the value 0xAA55. If this indicator is missing then the BIOS assumes that this is not a partition sector and the aforementioned error message will be issued.

2. System reboots over and over
Although this is not an error message, it can happen if the relative sectors point to an invalid OS pre loader. A trap is set and if the data that is loaded is not executable machine most BIOS’s will reboot.

3. Invalid Partition Table
This error message comes from the partition boot code. If there are no boot devices then the boot code will enter an infinite loop after this message is displayed.

4. Error Loading Operating System
After a valid partition is found the LBA sector pointed to by the partition entry table will be loaded using INT 13. This is the operating system loader. If the code cannot be loaded into memory then the above message is normally displayed.

5. Missing Operating System
Once the operating system boot code is loaded it is checked for the 0xAA55 identifier in the same manner that the partition sector is tested. If this test fails, then the above message will be displayed.

Over the years the BIOS writers have gotten smarter, personal computer as well as operating system standards have been set and are normally followed. So many of the messages, as well as error checking is now handled by the BIOS. The messages I have mentioned are just a few, but, are very common; however, from BIOS to BIOS the messages as well as the error handling can differ greatly.

As you can clearly see the partition sector is of primary importance in the boot sequence. Without it nothing happens. In the future there may be ways to overcome the use of a partition sector, one would be to store the partition entry data in the BIOS, this would eliminate boot sector viruses as well as the possibility that the boot sector goes bad and becomes unreadable. However for now, we will work with what we have. The next segment will discuss how to do partition recovery using a simple piece of software.

How To Use The Software

Free Partition Recovery is an extremely powerful tool for anyone to use but this statement must be caveated with the fact that with power comes a degree of responsibility. In other words, use this tool with extreme caution as it can destroy your file system to the point of massive and possibly permanent data loss. That being said lets take a look at how we can put this tool to good use.

First, the software should be run from a master drive. There should be two drives in the system, your boot drive from where the software is executed, and the damaged drive. The damaged drive being the one with the corrupt or missing partition. Free Partition Recovery is designed to work on Windows XP type operating systems, so make sure that you have unzipped the file onto that type of operating system.

Once the Free Partition Recovery has been executed you will see in Figure 1.

Figure 1

The top row displays all the physical drives currently active in your system. This will also include any external devices that can be mounted as a physical block device. An example of this would be the 80 GB Maxtor USB device. Once you choose a physical drive all partition entry data will be displayed as in Figure 2.

Figure 2

The partition entry data for this particular drive gives us a clear example of a drive that has been configured with one NTFS logical drive with the standard offset of 63 sectors, start head and sector of 1 and ending cylinder of 1023. These are classic values for a normal single logical drive setup.
The other three entries are clear and not in use. These entries will be ignored by the OS loader. There is one other important item in this configuration. On the far left of Figure 2 of the first partition entry is the boot flag “No”. This indicates that this partition is ‘Not Bootable’. You can change that value buy using the drop down list (Figure 3)

Figure 3

 

Once you have configured all of the partition entries to reflect the correct values all you need do is press the “Write” button. You will be presented with the following message box in Figure 4. A word of caution, once you write the data down to the partition sector, you must live with it. Please exhibit extreme caution.

Figure 4

Hopefully this information as well as the software will help you recover your data. If you have any questions email support@dtidata.com or call 727-345-9665 Ext 236.

You can download the free NTFS partition repair software here. For more info about data recovery visit our home page.

FREE FAT32 Data Recovery Software

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.

Undelete Files With Bad Sectors

Using Dart Undelete XP with drives that have bad sectors. Hard drive manufacturers have the monumental task of designing a device to store data knowing that by design, the device will fail. The shear physics of a hard drive make it doomed to failure. The steps that manufacturers have done to lessen data loss are two fold.

First, there is the implementation of the S.M.A.R.T. technologies. This system was designed to give the user a heads up when the drive may be failing. Several components such as drive speed, track to track time, head placement and many other tests are performed on the drives daily. These tests are used in a comparison over time manner and can show a pattern of device degradation. During the degradation cycle there is a manufacturer assigned percentage used that will alert the user of impending data loss. For instance, if a drive has been spinning at 7200 RPM for several months, then over the last several weeks the RPMs drop to 7000 RPM, this may be flagged as an impending problem and the user will be notified that possible data loss may occur in the near future. It is up to the user to backup the data and replace the degrading device.

Secondly, built in to every hard drive is a sector map. This map consists of two lists. The primary list, which is set at factory, maps all bad sectors out. These bad sectors are found and mapped before the drive is sold. In other words, hard drives are expected to have bad sectors. There is no such thing as a perfect hard drive. The reason for this is that a hard drive would cost several thousand dollars if procedures were introduced that would guarantee a perfect hard drive. In order to keep costs down drive remapping is used.

Now, once the list of all the bad sectors are made at the factory the drive is then shipped and sold. As the drive performs its day to day functions more bad sectors will appear. It is inevitable. These bad sectors are then mapped to another list. Both of the bad sector lists are mapped to a reserved area of the hard drive. There are only so many reserved area sectors for the firmware to remap to. Once these sectors are exhausted the firmware cannot remap and the bad sectors become part of your live data.

Signs that a drive has used its reserved sector area are, slow reads, slow boot sequence, operating system may seem to lock, may have to reboot several times before the operating system comes up. A chronic bad sector problem will eventually cause file loss, and ultimately the drive will not be able to identify itself to the BIOS and your data is either lost, or can be very expensive to recover.

If your drive is in a state where you have several bad sectors and you then either delete files, or the files just “disappear” the following is a list of symptoms that DART Undelete may exhibit.

1. It may take several minutes before the logical drive list is created. This is because you may have a slow reading, or intermittent reading sector(s) in the operating system boot area, or parameter blocks. The Master File Table primary entries may also have the same type of sectors.
2. The scan and build of the file list may take a very long time if bad sectors are embedded in the Master File Table. The Master File Table is the table of contents for your entire drive and tells the operating system where all your data is stored. If bad sectors are found in the Master File Table, then your problems have been compounded to an even higher degree and file loss is almost guaranteed.Three, during the copy of the deleted files to another drive the copy runs sluggishly. The copy could actually look as if it is frozen and the operating system may appear to be locked up. This is an indication that there are bad sectors in the data itself and the file you are trying to recover will more than likely be corrupt.If DART Undelete exhibits one or more of these symptoms all is not lost. However, using DART Undelete to try and recover the files using the standard method when you have bad sectors may actually exacerbate the problem on the drive and could eventually cause more data loss. So, the first thing to do is to stop using the software on a damaged drive. The next this to try is outlined in the following steps.
   

   Using Dart Undelete Data Recovery Software

   In order to recover deleted files from a drive that has bad sectors embedded in either the Operating System Boot Area, Master File Table, or Data Area it is necessary to move the data from the damaged drive to another working hard drive. To do this, you must use a piece of drive cloning software. There are several pieces of software that will clone drives for Windows, however, using cloning software in Windows can cause more problems.

   Here’s why.

   When software makes a request for a sector read from the hard drive it is passed to the operating system, the operating system then sends the request to the device driver, the device driver then sends a request the kernel. The kernel runs at ring zero. The kernel passes the request to the bus, the bus to DMA, then the firmware on the drive, and finally the head is engaged, moved to the proper cylinder, and the correct sector is read. The data is read, sent to DMA, this is then passed to kernel memory, then passed up to operating system memory and finally the application receives the sector data. Each one of these steps has a CRC check, some have multiple CRC checks, as well as compression checks and a plethora of other data checks. If any of these checks fail, the step will retry. You can have as many as a thousand retries for a single sector read request. If the request is at ring zero, that is considered a priority request and the operating system will sit and wait for a response. This is when the application seems to lock up, or freeze. It can actually slow the operating system down due to the prioritized task manager.

   With all of these requests for a single read, an already damaged drive is grinding away trying to pull the data off of the platter. The retries will actually wear down heads, platter media, it will heat up the drive so that the spindle will heat and the viscosity of the lubricant on the spindle can degrade and will eventually freeze the drive like an automotive engine with no oil. What we want to do here is to minimize the amount of read retries. The best way to do that is to run a simple operating system, and an application that does not have any retry requests. DTIDATA has such a piece of software, it is called Speed Clone and it runs from a floppy and uses FreeDOS as its operating system. The software is $49.50 and can be found on our website for download. There is also Knoppix for Linux that will allow you to use Linux cloning tools to copy the data from one drive to another. Knoppix can be a bit overwhelming for anyone who is not familiar with Linux, but, it is an excellent tool.

   Once you have decided on the proper imaging software you are going to have to place your source, and destination drives in the computer to do the copy.

• Open your computer and take out the bad drive.
• Make that your master drive by setting the jumpers on the drive.
• Take the drive that you are going to make the image on and make that your slave drive.
• Place the drives back in the computer with the proper cabling and air flow set up.
• Make sure that you have at the very least a 450 watt power supply in order to run all the fans, and hard drives that are now in your computer.
• Place Speed Clone in the floppy drive and boot your computer.
• Make sure that your BIOS is set to boot from the floppy first, then any other media. You want Speed Clone to boot the system.

If you have set up the software properly the operating system will boot right into the software. Both your drives should now be displayed in the window of Speed Clone. Since you have made the hard drive with the bad sectors the ‘master’ that drive should show up first in your ‘Source Drive’ list.

Mark the first drive as your source drive, and the second drive as your destination drive. Before you begin the clone make sure that your source drive is the drive with the bad sectors, and the destination drive is the new drive. The destination drive must be the same size or larger than the source drive.

This is of primary importance, Speed Clone takes no prisoners. If you have set up the drives wrong, if you choose the wrong source and destination drives Speed Clone does not care, it will destroy all data on the destination drive by using the data from the source drive, so please be very careful when using the application.

Editors Note 11/20/06: For a step by step tutorial on how to set up a slave drive with pictures and everything visit our “Data Recovery Tutorial setting up a hard drive as a slave”

Speed Clone will make an image on the destination drive and any bad sectors will be copied as zeroes. In other words, no data will be copied. A list of bad sectors will be created by Speed Clone. This list can be printed out and you can make a determination of how corrupt the file system may be.

That is for another article, and exceeds the scope of this one. If the drive has more than ten thousand bad sectors in the first 3 gigabytes of the drive, that’s not good and your file system will probably be fairly corrupt. If you have more than fifty thousand bad sectors in the first twenty to thirty percent of the drive that is also bad and your data as well as the file system is probably corrupt.

No matter, once the clone is finished reset your system to boot from XP, and make the new cloned drive the slave. All you need do now is run DART Undelete as normal and copy your deleted files onto the master drive. Everything depends on how clean your clone is. The fewer bad sectors, the better the data recovery will be.

Download DART Undelete:
DART Undelete File Recovery Software

Where To Copy Recoverd Data To

Where To Copy your Recovered Data?

I recently had a call from a customer who had tried used our DART File Undelete software to recover their data. Unfortunately once he saw his data, he then clicked copy and selected to copy it back down to the drive he was trying to recover from.

He had a good reason for why he did this; the main drive in the machine he was running the software on did not have enough room for all the data he wanted to restore. What I had to explain to him was the first rule of thumb with deleted files; never write anymore data to the drive once you realize you have deleted something important. 

The reason for this is Windows wants to write to areas of the drive it has written to before first. (go ahead and take a second to read that again LOL) The reason that they do that is in an effort to keep the file system contiguous, since people do not defrag often enough. So if you find yourself in the situation this customer was in it is better to save off little bits, check the data, and then write it off to CD, then it is to put any data on the hard drive with the deleted data.

NOTE: Even surfing the Internet on a machine with deleted files could overwrite them.

File Undelete When Overwritten

Overwriting a file, can I get it back?

 

In a recent data loss nightmare I had a customer call and state that they had a file on a jump drive, as well as a copy on the desktop. They used the process of moving the most current file to the jump drive to get the excel file back and forth from work. In a most unfortunate turn of events the customer had accidentally copied the OLDER version over the newer version.

 

His question to me was if we had some kind of software that would help him recover the file. The answer is no, there is no software that can fix this problem; once you overwrite a file it is gone. All of the information we would use to get to the file has been over written with the older file. There are a couple exceptions to this.

 

One would be QuickBooks files; Intuit may be able to still harvest some data from your drive. Another situation is a large data base file, especially if the one you copy over it is much smaller, a data recovery company like ours may be able to pull records off. For the most part though I would recommend you don’t OVERWRITE files when copy from one media to another just # them and once you are sure you have the right data delete the previous version. This tip will have a ton of headaches.

DTI DATA Recovery Software Line and Windows Vista Compatibility

We have been getting a lot of calls from people wanting to know if our Data Recovery Software is compatible with Windows Vista. I wanted to let our customers know that our Recover It All Professional, DART XP, and DART File Undelete are all Vista compatible.

Being a data recovery company, we feel that this form of data recovery software should not be installed. It sort of defeats us telling you not to install data recovery software on the affected drive and then forcing you to do so.

Safely Run Data Recovery Software on Vista

In order to gain proper access to your drives with our data recovery software you need to right click on the executable and “Run As Administrator” even if you are logged in as the admin. It is a function of Vista that will not allow full low level access to the hard drives unless you do this. I hope this clears up any confusion about our data recovery software and its compatibility with Vista.

For a list of our products, please visit our data recovery software page.

CRM Software AIMpromote

Running an online business can be a challenge if your company doesn’t have solid crm software. Customer Relationship Management Software can not only help you manage and improve lead conversion, but give your company invaluable business intelligence. Since we manage thousands of customers a day and even more quotes, we needed to find a solution that suited our unique business model. I thought I would share with you the company that gave us the best options for CRM.

On Demand CRM Software Lead Handling

Much like our business model, AIMpromote lets you try their lead management and CRM services before you buy. This is a huge advantage when searching for an easy to integrate CRM software solution. For those of you not familiar with CRM and what it can do for your business here is a link to WikiPedia’s CRM page. For one of the best solutions available on the web visit AIMpromote’s CRM  page.

When choosing business tools it is important to find the solution that not only best suites your needs but also your budget. Some of the best features of AIMpromote are:

• Lead Management
• Reporting
• User Management and Authentication
• Sales Force Automation
• Website Integration and Internet Marketing
• Support and Consultation

They really have an edge over their competitors in both services and pricing. You will be able to seamlessly integrate their powerful tools into your sales force, and easily manage leads and gather important business intelligence. Another powerful aspect of AIMpromote’s CRM Software is the reporting features which are hands down the best in the business. You will be able to track:

• Campaign Performance
• Return on Investment (ROI)
• Return on Advertising Spent (ROAS)
• Gross Profit
• Net Profit
• Campaign Cost
• Revenue from Leads
• Revenue from E-commerce Sales 
• Call Center Performance
• Real-time Reporting
• Activity Logging
• Duplicate Lead Removal 

No other company that offers lead management and CRM software offers that type of reporting in their base package. If you are straining to keep up with your growing business and have a sales force that is overwhelmed, then I suggest you call AIMpromote right away and give their CRM and lead handling on demand software a shot. They have an extensive testimonials page of business success stories. That and their fully featured 14 day trial is what swayed us, give AIMpromote a call today 1-888-251-4635 and put your business on the path to success!

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