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?

Fujitsu 500 GB Hard Drive

Ok here is another review of a new Fujitsu hard drive from my personal fave in hard drive manufacturers. This is really kind of awesome, a 2.5” half terabyte drive. I don’t know how you can go wrong with that. It only uses minimal power, 1.8W for read write, because of the Fujitsu’s Green Policy Innovation Program. It is a SATA 3.0/Gbs which makes it great for data transfer and storage. It runs at 4200 rpm which is a bonus in my book, those super high speed drives seem to fail all the time.

Now, whether that is because it is just too fast or because of the heat that it generates I am unsure but I know the fail rate is much higher on those 9k rpm drives. They are listing the seek time at around 13 milliseconds. I think these drives would be perfect for using in an external USB chassis since it is likely they are not going to run to hot. I should probably note that this is also the largest laptop drive out there now. I know that this will please all of you power laptop users. My husband is always out of disk space on his Dell, and I think this will make a great Father’s Day gift! Because the drive was only released on February 25^th there are no real reviews out there and we haven’t gotten any in for hard drive recovery, so if anyone has one of these big boys let me know what you think.

Western Digital My Passport Essential USB Drive: A Sleek New Portable

I think I have mentioned before that Western Digital is one of my favorite hard drive manufacturers. I was reading around on the Internet today and came across this. It is really a sweet little portable drive. With a max capacity of 320Gb and only weighing in at 5 ounces it is an awesome answer to all of the huge files need to move around now.

I am a little concerned about heat on this guy though, and would not recommend running it all the time. It would be best to just plug it in when you need to do your data transfers. It is not in need of a power source either, because it is powered by your USB port. I tried to look and see if anyone is talking about problems they have had with it and the only negative I could find was people thought the price should be lower. On this point I have to disagree, you can get the 320 for 200 bucks on their site, so I am sure there is a deal to be found on them. They come with special encryption software, as well as synchronization software. This can be very useful if you are transporting a PST file between 2 places (i.e. home and work). It is USB 2.0 compliant so you will get transfer rates around 450 to 480(MAX) Mbps. Let me know guys if you have any trouble with this hard drive.

Feel free to contact us if you need hard drive recovery on a My Passport or any other type of storage media.

Maxtor Shared Storage II and the Release of Central Axis

So in an effort to make our data available to us from anywhere Maxtor/Seagate has come up with a really cool idea. The Maxtor Shared Storage II line, which comes in 500 GB and 1 TB, now has the ability to allow users to log into a safe Internet browser site and gain access to their network attached storage (NAS) from anywhere.

You don’t need any special downloads or installs. Also there is no reason to open ports on your firewall or router to gain access to your data. I found this idea to be a long time coming, and think it is awesome that Maxtor is offering it free of charge with this line of NAS device. In the past I have expressed my dislike in the decline of what in the early 90’s was the Caddy of hard drive lines, and finally I think Seagate is moving that area of the company in the right direction.

I know I personally spend a lot of time out of the office and have found it difficult even with having a PDA/Phone to be able to gain access to my files I need to email easily. I am seriously considering the purchase of this product in the near future and will let you all know how that works out. I am very interested to see how the transfer rates are and if the ease of use is really what they are touting it to be. If anyone has one of these devices let me know what you think.

Seagate Momentus Hard Drive Recovery Review

The Seagate Momentus® 5400.4 hard drive recovery review.
At the end of January, Seagate started shipping the much talked about Momentus® 5400.4 hard drive. This drive is the newest in a line of laptop hard drives they have been developing. It uses a second-generation perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology. Which means instead of storing the data in conventional ‘longitudinal’ magnetic recording, in which the bits are directed circumferentially along the track direction, they are storing them perpendicular pointing up and down to the track.

What is good about this is the ability to get much higher storage as they can stack the data. On a laptop hard drive that means huge storage capacity never before seen. The 5400.4 is a 250 gig hard drive using SATA 300 and running at 5400 rpm. I did a lot of reading about this drive and really haven’t been able to find anything positive or negative about it. It is mass shipping to laptop manufacturers and I will update the status as soon as it is in the hands of the masses. Let us know if you have any questions about hard drive recovery by leaving a comment in this post.