Data Recovery Resources Freeware Software SNAP RAID How To Guides » Data Recovery Software How To’s

Using Recover It All Data Recovery Software On USB Firewire External Hard Drive

Michael Stankard — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 19:29:53 +0000

This video from Jacqui Best our tech guru explains how to use Recover It All. It not only gives a concise explanation on the inner workings of the program, but goes into detail on the best way to use it when recovering external hard drives!

Download now! Recover It All Demo will show you your data before you buy! No registration required, download a demo NOW!

Purchase Recover it All now. Instant delivery of software. RECOVER YOUR DATA NOW!

Not Formatted Would You Like to Format Now?

Jacqui Best — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 17:46:38 +0000

This is a common problem with external hard drives like the Western Digital My Book. The reason is that we as a USB using public do not “Safely Remove” the hardware before we turn off or unplug the devices from our computers. A lot of the time this is due to the fact that Windows will not allow us to safely remove the drive. We get an error that says the device is still in use by some ghost application. This seems to be less and less of problem with the release of Windows 7. When we remove the device improperly there is always a chance that the cached data will be dumped somewhere inconvenient and a lot of times that area is going to be the “system area” or what is also referred to as the MBR or the OS Boot Sector. Why does the data dump choose to go there? I have to come to believe over the years that it is because some coder somewhere thought it would be funny.

How do I fix it you ask? There are couple of different ways. The first way would be to download a piece of recovery software, something like Recover It All, let it scan and then move the data off to another hard drive. After you move all the data it would then be safe to format your external hard drive and move the data back. This method is the tried and true method of data recovery, but it is time intensive and requires that you have another drive with enough storage to hold the data. The other problem I foresee is that you may also miss an important file.

There is another option though, and that is the Recover It Now service we offer. With this service I use LogMeIn to come into the machine remotely. I load my tools on to your machine and then fix the drive on the fly. When all is said and done you will be back up and running like crash never happened. I can also offer diagnostic analysis of the hard drive for free as well as point you in the right direction of what recovery software will be the best option.

If you want to discuss the options please give me a call at 727.345.9665 ext 236 and I will be happy to help!

DTI Data 10th Anniversary Celebration

Michael Stankard — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 18:57:00 +0000

We are very happy to announce that 2010 marks the 10th anniversary of DTI Data’s hard drive recovery service. Even though we had been selling software since 1994, it was in 2000 that we opened our main hard drive recovery facility. This has been a great decade for DTI and its customers and we are not going to stop now!

DTI 10th Anniversary Special!

To honor 10 years of business we are offering a special package of premium software for only $149.99

Save Over $50.00 On Data Recovery Software!

Recover It All – The industry standard in advanced data recovery software
DART XP – A fast and powerful data recovery software
DART UNDELETE – Super fast undelete tool with a powerful scanning engine
Digital Picture Recovery – Powerful digital photo recovery tool
Speed Clone Suite – hard drive imaging tools that work in both Windows as well as a self loading operating system that can access hard drives without running Windows. 3 distinct drive imaging tools included in the suite!

Data Recovery Forum Questions Answered PST Recovery and Hard Drive Not Detected

Jacqui Best — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:22:05 +0000

So I trolled the Internet for topics to write about and found tons of forums with very good questions not being answered so I am going to post the questions and then give you the best possible answer I cam up with.

Q: Yesterday I was cleaning out the rubbish from my PC, as it was getting a bit slow. Along the way I deleted an old user account folder from Documents and settings on my C drive.
Later that day I went to check my emails only to find my PST file was missing. at which point I remembered it was in the old user folder. I started looking for software to recover this file. The file is about 1GB and has lots of info that I need.

A: Their are a a bunch of schools of thought on this recovery method but generally they are all just that THOUGHT. You have to take into account a ton of different variables. The first being how much data was applied to the drive after he deleted the PST file. My guess would be a lot since he eludes to the fact the drive was full in the post. If the drive was being written to at all recovery options are dropped DRASTICALLY since the data is more then likely gone due to an over write. If there was no data put on the disk after he deleted it, then the best course of action would of course be an piece of software that could UNDELETE the file. As a last ditch effort I would sometimes recommend that the customer try some for of raw file harvesting but the drive will have to been defragged on a regular basis other wise the file will be all over the hard drive and the harvester will not be able to locate all of the pieces.

Q: I got an old Dell Dimension 3000 laying in pieces on my hardwood floor… and I can get other hard drives to read in it, even get an operating system to boot, and such. No issues.. But when I try to put this… Seagate Barracuda 7200.9
160GB hard drive in, it will not detect it, at all. Pulled up the bios, planning on inputting everything manually into it… But I can’t seem to find the option to do it… I can change the “Master drive” from … “Auto” to “Off” and that’s it.
I’m curious if there’s a way to know if the bios is compatible with this hard drive… if there’s a way to find out if it is, or isn’t.. Or just something I’m completely lacking intelligence on figuring this thing out. Seriously need this computer up with this hard drive. I can still access the drive from my computer… But I’m worried that if the HD Is infected.. IF it would infect my other HD’s… and I don’t want that to happen. I currently run No anti virus. I tend to avoid virus’s pretty easily, and very rarely actually get hit with them. and when I do, it’s usually pretty simple for me to remove them because I catch them pretty instantly..

A: So here is the deal this is a boot drive from another computer, slaving it into the machine COULD be causing some kind of “which drive should boot” conflict. The second problem he could have is that the bios is too old to see the drive, that it doesn’t support LBA mode or something strange like that. My personal recommendation would be to pull the drive out and get yourself a USB enclosure this will take all of those other issues out of the equation and then you can just deal with the OS seeing it which will make things much easier. It is a trick we use as a data recovery company when either Windows is having trouble booting with a certain drive in it or when we can not get the bios to see a drive.

Speed Clone For Windows Released

Dick Correa — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:43:10 +0000

DTI Data Recovery continues its excellence in software development by releasing Speed Clone for Windows. The new Speed Clone download package includes the Windows version as well as a bootable DOS ISO for cloning hard drives that are registered in the BIOS. It also has the original Speed Clone that works off of a floppy.

Speed Clone is a powerful tool that allows technicians to clone from physical to physical drive or create an image file of a physical drive. The most powerful feature of the software is the error reporting facility. Using native Windows diagnostics as well as the internals of the software the technician can get a clear idea of the physical status of the drive. By using a simple file system map a technician can accurately pinpoint problems in the file system. This software was designed with the knowledge that there may be bad sectors on a drive and that is the reason it is being cloned/imaged. In order to facilitate an accurate diagnosis a robust error reporting system has been integrated into the software. This fact alone will make Speed Clone a technicians most valuable tool.

In addition, Speed Clone will allow the technician to walk away from a multi-drive multi-image session instead of watching for each image to finish. This time saving function will allow for easier replication of RAID components before a destripe or RAID mount is attempted.

Even if the technician is not cloning the ‘Scan’ facility allows you to take a diagnostic look at a hard drive. With the printable error report this tool can be used to advise a potential client of the possibility of recovery.

When working with hard drives a technician rarely sees one that is not damaged. Speed Clone was designed with the technician in mind to help give them a leg up in this competitive market. Add this software to your arsenal of data recovery tools in order to better and more accurately serve your clients.

DTI Data Recovery continues its excellence in software development by releasing Speed Clone for Windows. The new Speed Clone download package includes the Windows version as well as a bootable DOS ISO for cloning hard drives that are registered in the BIOS. It also has the original Speed Clone that works off of a floppy.

Speed Clone is a powerful tool that allows technicians to clone from physical to physical drive or create an image file of a physical drive. The most powerful feature of the software is the error reporting facility. Using native Windows diagnostics as well as the internals of the software the technician can get a clear idea of the physical status of the drive. By using a simple file system map a technician can accurately pinpoint problems in the file system. This software was designed with the knowledge that there may be bad sectors on a drive and that is the reason it is being cloned/imaged. In order to facilitate an accurate diagnosis a robust error reporting system has been integrated into the software. This fact alone will make Speed Clone a technicians most valuable tool.

In addition, Speed Clone will allow the technician to walk away from a multi-drive multi-image session instead of watching for each image to finish. This time saving function will allow for easier replication of RAID components before a destripe or RAID mount is attempted.

When working with hard drives a technician rarely sees one that is not damaged. Speed Clone was designed with the technician in mind to help give them a leg up in this competitive market. Add this software to your arsenal of data recovery tools in order to better and more accurately serve your clients.

If you work on hard drives you cannot be without the full suite of Speed Clone!

Purchase Speed Clone here or read more about it on our Speed Clone page.

Only $49.50

Online Data Recovery Training

Michael Stankard — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 18:26:43 +0000

DTI Data Recovery is happy to announce its new online data recovery training course. Exclusive to our resellers, this course has trained hundreds of companies to make money with data recovery services.

For 1 month only, DTI Data Recovery is opening this course up to the public. We are offering only 4 online data recovery courses in 2009. Each course will include our full version data recovery software we sell, but also tools that only our engineers use. You will be able to recover everything from lost emails to deleted pictures, data lost from partition corruption and viruses as well as the following:

Calculating and fixing a partition record for single and multipe partitions
Restoring a deleted file by hand in FAT32
Restoring a deleted file by hand in NTFS
Determining the drive order of a RAID 5
Restoring a file system using the backup OS Boot Records (NTFS and FAT32)
Rebuilding a EXTFS2/3 file system using the super block
Mounting the XFS file system from a NAS device in Linux
Recovering JPEG files using a file harvesting technique
Recovering MP3 files using a file harvesting technique
Recovering a PST file using file harvesting, unused cluster map and scanpst
Restoring the MFT from the backup
Reading the block map for an EXTFS2/3 file system.
Determining Block size of a RAID 5
Determining RAID data set for a Simpletech NAS device
Novell NWFS file system
Microsoft Access Database file format and recovery
How to configure a Knoppix disk
How to configure a Bart PE disk
Recovering data from a DBX file
Swapping USB Enclosures

The course is discounted from its original price of $2500.00 to $995.00 and will not be held again this year.

Reserve your class now, before it is too late, only 10 members per class!
Call 866-418-3843 or fill out Online Data Recovery Training Sign Up Form

Learn more about online data recovery training here.

New Hard Drive Recovery Tools From DTI

Michael Stankard — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 17:36:28 +0000

DTI Data is happy to announce new hard drive recoverytools, for professionals and users alike. We have always had the best in Freeware data recovery software, and these new tools are no different. In today’s marketplace, home users are as likely to have a RAID system in their home PC’s as a business would. The unfortunate thing is most users choose a RAID 0 which is a spanned set, rather than a RAID 1 which is a mirror.

Our new hard drive recovery suite is especially meant for RAID users. It will diagnose problems as well as allow users to see what data exists on either a broken RAID or on individual RAID drives.

Stay tuned for more information and links to the hard drive recovery download page.

Recovering FAT32 With File System Markers

Dick Correa — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 16:13:35 +0000

In my last installment, Recovering FAT 32 with File Entry Records, I talked about USB and Fire Wire devices and how they are susceptible to damage. In addition I spoke about the file system used to store data on these devices as being FAT32 in order for the manufacturer to optimize their marketing base. Finally, I spoke about the fact that if the device is formatted by a non-native operating system (non windows) how could the data be recovered if in fact certain critical components were destroyed or masked. As an example I am using a live case for this particular instance. This clients drive lost the MBR, OS Boot Records, and FAT markers by formatting their MyBook usng a Mac. These are major system components with critical data that is necessary to align the drive. What can we now use to bring this FAT file system back into a state where we can recover the data.

In the FAT file system the index records for each file and folder are not stored in one static area. As an example of an alternate technique, if you were to format a drive using Windows XP then, of course, the default file system would be NTFS. One of the characteristics of NTFS is that it uses a Master File Table to store all the information about each file and folder. The MFT is stored almost exclusively in the same place every time a drive is formatted. Normally the MFT will start at cluster 786432 (LBA 6291456 assuming a 4K cluster) and will extend contiguously for several thousand records. In other words, the entire index for your file system is stored in an area approximately 150MB to 200MB in size. If this area were zeroed out it would destroy all of the information as to where your files are stored and in most cases hamstring the end-users ability to recover their data, especially if the data is fragmented. One may think that 200 MB of data is a lot of data to zero out, but I can assure you with Windows XP optimized for disk I/O and hard drives using a blazing fast DMA the destruction of the MFT would almost be transparent. You would never know it happened until it was too late.

That being said, conversely the FAT file system stores their folder and file information in clusters using a file entry record. As the file system matures the clusters that are used move farther down the drive since data is now occupying the clusters closer to the beginning of the drive. The FAT chaining system is used for folders that have more files than can be stored in a single cluster. It is easy to see that the folder information can be scattered across the drive. Although this plays havoc with hard drives and access speeds it makes it difficult to destroy the file system. This cluster scattering was not by design and to this day is considered a drawback to the file system, however, it does make data recovery much easier when major file system components are lost.

So now that we know that file entry records are used to index the file system for FAT the problem arises as to how best to identify a file entry record from the billions of other bytes on the hard drive. In my next installment I will outline a file entry record and reveal the attributes that allow us to filter a folder storing file names from all of the other data.

Related Resources:

Recovering FAT 32 with File Entry Records – the first part of this series.

External Hard Drive Recovery

Hard Drive Recovery

Recovering FAT32 with File Entry Record Data Only

Dick Correa — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:38:25 +0000

External USB hard drive devices have been a real ‘boon’ for the hard drive recovery industry. From the fact that they dissipate heat poorly, they are susceptible to vibration, and your dog walking past your computer happily wagging its tail can knock your precious data on the floor and destroy those irreplaceable pictures you took on your vacation last year, USB and Fire Wire drives comprise twenty five to thirty five percent of our hard drive recovery business. In addition to this the manufacturers thought they would be smart and format these external gems using the FAT32 file system. The reasoning behind this is that this particular file system is well documented, and Linux, Mac, and of course Microsoft can read from, and write to this file system.

In theory, this sounds like a great marketing idea having the ability to sell external USB and Fire Wire hard drives to three different operating systems. In theory. In practice, it presents some unique problems. As an example; a real life example, I have in my posession a Western Digital My Book that was formatted originally as a FAT32. However, this particular My Book was used for video editing and storage for a documentary on a Mac. For whatever reason this particular client decided to format the drive. In speaking with the client, this was not the intention. That being said, the drive was formatted using an EFI format that destroyed huge chunks of the FAT as well as destroying the OS Boot record, and the back-up OS Boot Record. In addition, the Master Boot Record had odd data for the partition starting points, and file system type on the external hard drive.

Now, with the MBR in the wind, both the OS boot records destroyed, and the beginning markers of both FATS gone, has does one reconstruct the original configuration of the FAT32 file system? In the next installment I will illustrate how Microsoft leaves little remnants of the file system all across the drive, and how these remnants can be used to recover the file system.

Related Resources:

hard drive recovery

external usb firewire hard drive data recovery

DART XP Data Recovery Software Now Only $49

Jacqui Best — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 18:07:43 +0000

A few weeks back I got a call from a woman who had lost the partition on her hard drive; she had all of the photos of her kids on that drive and was slightly hysterical about it. I had her download DART XP and run it on the drive; it found the partition and then showed her a full directory structure. This was great now she can get the pictures of her children back. I tell her just click the purchase button and put in your credit card information and you can then copy your files off. She asks me how much is the software and I tell her $99.00, she starts to cry. She explains that she doesn’t have the funds to justify spending a hundred dollars to save her personal photos. I was moved by that, because she was completely honest, so I asked if fifty bucks would be more attainable, she agreed that although it would still make her in a pinch that she could swing it. So I charged her card 50 dollars and then sent her a code for the software. It occurred to me though, that many of our customers may be suffering from this same problem and that during these times we might want to help out with a price reduction on our data recovery software. I spoke with my boss and he agreed that a drop in price for the time being would a huge help to our customers, so that they will be able to still retrieve their personal data. We hope this helps in some small way and if you need help using the data recovery software as always you can reach me at 727-345-9665 ext 236.

Buy The Software:

MFT Data Recovery

Dick Correa — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 20:47:36 +0000

Over the years I have recovered many hard 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

Jacqui Best — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:55:33 +0000

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.

Be at the computer with the problem when you call.
Know what operating system the computer is running
Know how many partitions the hard drive has.
Make a mental not of what happened to the drive and the steps you have taken to get the data back.
Know which pieces of hard drive recovery software you have run on the hard drive
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.
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.
Make sure you have administrative rights to the computer you are trying to recover.
Have a pen and paper ready, in case the technician has a list of steps they would like for you to perform.
Write down any errors you have received, I will be asking you.
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

Dick Correa — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 17:07:10 +0000

NOTE FROM MICHAEL: 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 Recovery All 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 0x7C00. The 512 bytes is a standard sector size. It then jumps to that address (0x7C00) 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 freeware data recovery visit our free data recovery software page.

We have also just released a FREEWARE solution that will save your NTFS master file table to our secure servers for possible data recovery. It acts as a remote restore point and MFT backup.

FREE FAT32 Data Recovery Software

Dick Correa — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 21:26:03 +0000

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

Dick Correa — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 21:41:38 +0000

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.

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.
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

Jacqui Best — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 16:53:41 +0000

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.

DTI DATA Recovery Software Line and Windows Vista Compatibility

Jacqui Best — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 19:02:25 +0000

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.

Undelete Lost Files With DART File Recovery

Victoria Stankard — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 22:55:58 +0000

We have all deleted a file by accident. When you empty the recycle bin after deleting a file, you will need undelete data recovery software to restore your data. DTI was one of the first data recovery companies to create a program made just for data undelete. Called Fast File Undelete, it could be run from a floppy disk and was very powerful. Fast File Undelete had many revisions over the years each one improving its undelete capabilities.

When a file is deleted, the actual sectors on the hard drive where the file existed remain unchanged until another file needs that space. The only thing deleted is the header information or the marker. Fast File Undelete is able to get that file back by using a powerful scanning tool. It could also rebuild certain types of file types making it the most popular undelete program for years.

Undelete Data In XP or Windows Vista

With the arrival of Windows Vista and the popularity of XP, DTI’s programmers decided to focus on the NTFS file system and make an undelete software focused on XP, Server and Vista. The result is DART Undelete one of the most powerful tools ever created for data recovery.

Have you accidentally deleted important files from your hard drive, or your hard drive became corrupted, or you mistakenly formatted your drive losing all or some of your important data, files, and folders?
Download the fully functional demo of DART Undelete and SEE your lost files before you buy!

DART Undelete Data Recovery Software uses read-only access and never writes any information on the hard drive it is recovering data from. It’s strongly recommended to never install any programs including Data Recovery Software, that can overwrite the original files that you are trying to undelete. Call us if you have any questions about DART Undelete!24 Hour Hard Drive Recovery & Server/RAID Recovery Hotline:
Toll Free 1-866-438-6932 or direct 1-727-345-9665.

Extended Software Support:
8 AM to 11 PM EST 7days a week!

Data Recovery Software DART XP Overview

Victoria Stankard — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 21:16:53 +0000

There are many types of data recovery software to choose from. If you are running Windows XP or Vista and are having problems with your computer not booting, then DART XP is the file recovery program you should use. Our programmers spent a lot of time working out the best ways to recover files from the NTFS file system. Rather than create a product that will work on all versions of Windows, they focused on the Operating systems that utilize NTFS, XP, Server, and Windows Vista.

Why DART XP Is The Best File Recovery Program

The primary things that separate DART XP from other file recovery programs are:

Ease of Use – DART XP is a very powerful file recovery program, but is extremely easy to use.
Scans Faster – DART XP and SmartScan^TMmake the hard drive scanning portion of data recovery extremely fast. Other file recovery programs can take hours to scan a 60GB hard drive.
Shows Recovered Files Before You Buy It – DART XP will show you the files that can be recovered before you buy it! Using a simple color coding, DART XP easily identifies the files that can be recovered BEFORE YOU BUY.
Saves The Scan In Demo Mode – the demo or evaluation version of DART XP fully scans the drive and shows the recoverable data. If you are satisfied, simply purchase the product right through the program interface and you have the full version within minutes. You do not have to run the scan again! The full version instantly unlocks your files and allows you to move them to stable media.
Powerful Search Engine – if there are specific file types you are looking for, DART XP’s powerful search tool, will recover your most important files first allowing you to get back to work while the rest of the hard drive is being recovered.

All in all, DART XP is the most powerful file recovery program for the price on the market!

Download a demo for DART XP. Find other data recovery software. Visit DTI’s Data Recovery home page.

24 Hour Hard Drive Recovery & Server/RAID Recovery Hotline:
Toll Free 1-866-438-6932 or direct 1-727-345-9665.

Extended Software Support:
8 AM to 11 PM EST 7days a week!

Data Recovery Software

Victoria Stankard — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 22:32:49 +0000

All of DTI’s Data Recovery Software are created right here in our own labs. Our programmers work closely with the data recovery engineers that perform hard drive recovery. Together they have developed the most powerful tool set for file recovery that exists. Our developers then create easy to use graphical interfaces that wrap the professional grade data recovery tools into workable software.

Data Recovery Software For Every Situation

DTI Data Recovery is very proud of its latest file recovery software line: D.A.R.T. DART is especially designed for the NTFS 5 file system that is used by Microsoft Windows in XP and Vista. DART is extremely sophisticated data recovery software designed for both end users and computer repair technicians. By melding hard drive recovery technology with advanced undelete and partition repair features the new DART Data Recovery Software line is second to none.

At this time there are two powerful versions of DART:

DART XP File Recovery Program - fashioned for NTFS 5 DART XP is the most powerful data recovery software available on teh market for Windows XP and Vista. It is fast and powerful with advanced file search and filter features.
DART Undelete - Built for Vista and XP, DART Undelete can recover files that have been deleted or lost that other undelete recovery tools couldn’t recover. It also has a powerful but easy to use design.

DTI’s flagship product is the Recover It All software line. Recover It All is powerful data recovery software that works on Multiple Operating Systems:

If you need data recovery software please visit our file recovery programs pages:

24 Hour Hard Drive Recovery & Server/RAID Recovery Hotline:
Toll Free 1-866-438-6932 or direct 1-727-345-9665.

Extended Software Support:
8 AM to 11 PM EST 7days a week!

**IF you have sent your drive to another company click here to find out what DTI Data can do for you!

For Free Fully Functional Data Recovery Tools click here.

To Download demo software that will show you your data before you pay for it, click here.

If you have a clicking hard drive visit our hard drive recovery page.

Data Recover Of A QuickBooks File

Jacqui Best — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 20:47:50 +0000

Many companies and people rely on QuickBooks to manage their money and accounts. If you have had data loss to your QuickBooks file this article can help you get your data back. If your hard disk can’t be accessed you might need hard drive recovery prior to the actual QuickBooks file restoration.

QuickBooks File Recovery Without Hard Drive Repair

In a situation where your hard drive has been formatted and the OS reloaded, or there has been a catastrophic crash to where you can no longer access the data due to some sort of logical anomaly (this means not PHYSICALLY damaged), but you need your QBB or QBW files back there is an answer.

Intuit in all their wonderful support offers a service to their customers. You can call them up, explain that you need your QuickBooks file back and they will have you send them the hard drive. They have their own software that will piece you file back together and they will send you the file back. This is a phenomenal service that they offer, for a nominal fee. From the customers I have talked to it is only about 300 bucks to get them to do this for you, so give them a call if you need your QBW,QBB files back at 1-888-320-7276.

Physical Hard Drive Crash QuickBooks File Data Recovery

So what do you do when Intuit can’t recover the file because it can’t be gotten off the hard drive? Well then it is time to call DTI Data! We offer no data no charge upfront flat rate pricing on all hard drive recovery. That means you will know exactly what it will cost to have your data recovered. We have a class 100 clean room to perform physical hard drive repair in.

Call 24 Hour Hard Drive Recovery & Server/RAID Recovery Hotline:
Toll Free 1-866-438-6932 or direct 1-727-345-9665. Or fill out an Online Data Recovery Quote If you need hard drive recovery.

Data Recovery Software Overview

Victoria Stankard — Thu, 24 May 2007 01:07:56 +0000

DTI Data Recovery creates all of it’s data recovery software right here in our labs in West Florida. Since 1992 our engineers have been creating cutting edge state of the art data recovery software.

Data Recovery Software Explained

There are many different types of data recovery software. The most common types can do the following:

Recover lost files that have been deleted by accident.
Undelete files from the recycle bin.
Restore damaged partitions.
Recreate boot sectors
Rewrite partitions
Recover deleted emails
Recover lost digital pictures. There is a difference between data file recovery software and utilities. Most data recovery utilities are advanced programs that can clone hard drives or even erase hard disks and wipe all their data.

Advanced Data Recovery With Recover It All

Jacqui Best, our chief data recovery software support engineer, has been kind enough to write several articles about how to do advanced data recovery with DTI’s flagship program Recover It All.

Here is an overview of the data recovery software topics she has covered:

How To Tell If Your Hard Drive Has A Physical Problem - a guide that tells you how to diagnose physical hard disk drive problems.
Building The Partition Record – this tutorial explains how to re-create, build, or re-build partition record that was damaged, altered by a virus, deleted, etc.
Building A Boot Sector – another great guide on how to use Recover It All Data Recovery Software to do advanced recovery.
Multiple Partition Data Recovery – a tutorial on how to recover data from multiple partitions.

DTI’s Data Recovery Software Products shows you your data before you buy it! All of our demo software is fully functional and allows you to save your scan so you won’t have to run the scan over again with the full version.

Extended Data Recovery Software Support:
8 AM to 11 PM EST 7days a week!

24 Hour Hard Drive Recovery & Server/RAID Recovery Hotline:
Toll Free 1-866-438-6932 or direct 1-727-345-9665.

How To Tell If Hard Drive Has Physical Damage

Jacqui Best — Wed, 16 May 2007 00:56:22 +0000

Does my drive have Physical Damage?

I get asked this question a ton. The answer is not always as easy to answer as you would think. In many cases identification is easy. For example, if the drive is clicking, or smoke is coming out of it, there are pretty definitive signs of physical damage.

On the other side of the obvious we run in to drives that are still booting and functioning almost the way it always have. Maybe it is a little slow, something you might over look. Maybe the machine just reboots on its own sometimes, or shuts off completely. In these situations it is very likely that this drive may have bad sectors. Now how exactly these bad sectors occur is a plethora of reasons. One of the reasons would be a highly fragmented hard drive, since the heads need to move back and forth across the platters a lot more there is a lot more chance for them to come closer then they are supposed to. Anther big reason hard drives get bad sectors is heat, as I have discussed before, hard drives a extremely heat sensitive and even the most minor warping of a platter could cause bad sectors.

What you must understand is when you have a bad sector, is that these things tend to propagate themselves. The reason for this is that when Windows comes across a bad sector it is going to continue to retry that sector, and by retry that means the head resetting every time for another go at the sector. As this abuse to the hard drive continues, there is a high likelihood of more bad sectors in that area.

So I am sure you are thinking, how do I know if it is bad sectors? There is a really easy way to tell, download the Recover It All Professional DEMO. Set the software up to do a “slow logical scan” and then wait to see if you get any RD ERR, you will then know you have bad sectors on the hard drive.

My recommendation at that point is you back off the data you can and get yourself a new hard drive. If this is not feasible then formatting the hard drive should write out the bad areas, but it is highly likely the problem will continue.

24 Hour Hard Drive Recovery & Server/RAID Recovery Hotline:
Toll Free 1-866-438-6932 or direct 1-727-345-9665.

Extended Software Support:
8 AM to 11 PM EST 7days a week!

Building The Partition Record Using Recover It All Professional

Jacqui Best — Mon, 07 May 2007 23:32:23 +0000

There are times when the operating system may not recognize the correct partitioning of the hard drive.
This may be due to a virus overwriting the original partition record, an accidental ‘fdisk’, operating system anomaly, software anomaly any other of a million reasons. We do have a solution though, that may be able to bring back access to your data.

NOTE: This function of Recover It All Partition Repair Data Recovery Software will WRITE data to sectors of the hard drive. Anytime that a write is performed there is a possibility for more corruption, so use this function only in emergencies. You may also want to clone the hard drive first with something like Speed Clone, so that you always have a back up of your data in its current state.

Rebuild Partition Record For Data Recovery

Under the ‘Utilities’ menu option click on the menu item which displays ‘Build Partition Record’. You will be presented with a dialog box, similar to the one you are viewing now.

There are several fields that need some explanation. They are as follows.

Start Head, Start Sector, Start Cylinder:
These three fields are the starting delimiter for the partition. On a single partitioned drive the normal parameters are 0, 1, 0 respectively. That is, start head 0, start sector 1, and start cylinder 0. You will use this most of the time unless you have some type of diagnostic partition, or boot handler.
End Head, End Sector, End Cylinder:
These three fields are the other side of the coin, or the ending delimiter for the partition. On a single partitioned drive the normal parameters are 254, 63, 1023 respectively. That is, end head 254, end sector 63, end cylinder 1023. Once again you will use these most of the time unless you have some type of weird inverted, upside down sideways configuration which would change the sector, or head count.
One note here, the ending head will never exceed 254, the ending sector will never exceed 63, and the ending cylinder will almost never exceed 1023.
Reserved Sectors:
This field’s value is the total sectors from the partition record to the boot record, where the boot record is considered the actual beginning of the partition, otherwise known as the logical drive. On a single partitioned drive this is normally 63 sectors. If you have a multiple partition hard drive this value will vary greatly.
Total Sectors:
In order to figure out if you have the correct total sectors you will need to get out your trusty calculator and do a little math. To properly report the total sectors on a drive partition you multiply the heads, times the sectors, times the cylinders minus the reserved sectors. You can find this information but clicking the little plus sign next to physical data and then the plus sign next to geometry.

I am running the software on a Maxtor 6Y120P0 (120 gigabyte) hard drive the heads are 255, the sectors are 63 and the cylinders are 14946. That gives you 240107490 sectors, minus the 63 reserved sectors for a final tally of 240107426 sectors for a single partitioned drive.

LBA Sector:
This field connotes where to place you newly configured partition. On a single partitioned drive the LBA sector will be 0.
Bootable:
This little check box is very important. Without marking the partition as bootable the boot code will not execute, and your computer will just hang. However, only mark the partition bootable if it is the primary, and boot partition.

Now that we have all of the fields filled in, we can send our partition sector to the hard drive. Just click on the ‘Write’ button.

You will receive a warning telling you that you are writing to the hard. Ignore said warning if you TRULY want to write the boot record. If you have any questions, please feel free to call technical support:

Toll Free 1-866-438-6932 or direct 1-727-345-9665.

Extended Software Support:
8 AM to 11 PM EST 7days a week!

You can download the demo for Recover It All here.

Buy Recover It All Now

Buy Speed Clone Now

File Recovery How To Use A Sector Editor To Find Lost Data

Jacqui Best — Tue, 01 May 2007 22:25:39 +0000

A lot of times when I am talking to customers who are in a catastrophic data recovery situation, I tell them they can use a sector editor in order to find a majority of their missing TEXT from their Microsoft Word and Excel documents. This article will explain how to do that.

How to Use a Sector Editor to Find DOC Files

NOTE: You will need a sector editor, I personally use WinHEX. Warning: this is a very powerful data recovery tool and should be used with extreme caution, as to not have further data loss.

The first thing you need to do is to think about the content of the document you are trying to recover. (In my example I am going to use a previous article I wrote) In my document I was discussing how to build a boot sector with Recover It All Professional. I have a good idea of what was contained in the article and most important I have some key words I can search for in order to find the text I am looking for.

So let’s open WinHex. Now let’s open the drive where we think the file is located.

After clicking the “Open Disk” icon we will be presented with a drive list. I recommend you search the physical disk, not the logical disk.

After you choose the drive you will get a HEX/TEXT look at the hard drive.

The next step is to search for the text contained in the file. For me I know the file contained the words “building a boot sector” so I hit CRTL+F and the find screen comes up.

I type in my search string and click OK. The search will begin. Now depending where the file resides on the hard drive will determine how long the scan takes.

Once the software has found the first instance of your search you will be able to look in that text area and see if this is the data you are looking for. If it is not the data you can hit F3 and continue the search until you come across what you are looking for. If it is the data you are looking for you can then select all of the relevant text and copy and paste it into any word processor. All of the formatting will be gone of course, but at least you will have the text of the document back.

Often times a data recovery program will recover a document, but it is corrupt. This means of pure file recovery can help you restore files that have become corrupted. Check out our data recovery software page for information on all the programs we have to offer. All data recovery software on our site was created by our own programmers and engineers right here in our labs.

If you need data recovery software please visit our file recovery programs pages:

24 Hour Hard Drive Recovery & Server/RAID Recovery Hotline:
Toll Free 1-866-438-6932 or direct 1-727-345-9665.

Extended Software Support:
8 AM to 11 PM EST 7days a week!

**IF you have sent your drive to another company click here to find out what DTI Data can do for you!

For Free Fully Functional Data Recovery Tools click here.

To Download demo software that will show you your data before you pay for it, click here.

If you have a clicking hard drive visit our hard drive recovery page.

* Email
* First Name
* Last Name
Phone
* Business Type
* State Abreviation
	* = Required Field

Data Recovery Resources Freeware Software SNAP RAID How To Guides » Data Recovery Software How To’s

Using Recover It All Data Recovery Software On USB Firewire External Hard Drive

Not Formatted Would You Like to Format Now?

DTI Data 10th Anniversary Celebration

DTI 10th Anniversary Special!

Save Over $50.00 On Data Recovery Software!

Data Recovery Forum Questions Answered PST Recovery and Hard Drive Not Detected

Speed Clone For Windows Released

Online Data Recovery Training

New Hard Drive Recovery Tools From DTI

Recovering FAT32 With File System Markers

Recovering FAT32 with File Entry Record Data Only

DART XP Data Recovery Software Now Only $49

MFT Data Recovery

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

FREE NTFS Partition Repair Data Recovery Software

FREE FAT32 Data Recovery Software

Undelete Files With Bad Sectors

Using Dart Undelete Data Recovery Software

Where To Copy Recoverd Data To

DTI DATA Recovery Software Line and Windows Vista Compatibility

Safely Run Data Recovery Software on Vista

Undelete Lost Files With DART File Recovery

Undelete Data In XP or Windows Vista

Data Recovery Software DART XP Overview

Data Recovery Software

Data Recovery Software For Every Situation

Data Recover Of A QuickBooks File

QuickBooks File Recovery Without Hard Drive Repair

Physical Hard Drive Crash QuickBooks File Data Recovery

Data Recovery Software Overview

Data Recovery Software Explained

Advanced Data Recovery With Recover It All

How To Tell If Hard Drive Has Physical Damage

Building The Partition Record Using Recover It All Professional

Rebuild Partition Record For Data Recovery

File Recovery How To Use A Sector Editor To Find Lost Data

How to Use a Sector Editor to Find DOC Files