Just about the worst thing a Windows user can be told is that Windows wants to format one of your hard drives. This is becoming more prevalent with external hard drives, that can not only be told it needs to be formatted, but can disappear … [Read more...]
Recovering Folder Relationships Using DOS Clustering Design
November 18, 2008 By
   In my last installment I described what a file entry record would look like if it were in fact a cluster holding file entry data. I went over the fact that the first two entries of the folder cluster would be a period followed by ten spaces, … [Read more...]
Recovering FAT32 With File System Markers
October 24, 2008 By
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 … [Read more...]
Hard Drive Form Factors Explained
October 9, 2008 By
This is the first article in a series that will explain how hard drives work, why they fail and what you as users can do to protect your data. When looking at hard drives the first step is to identify what it's form factor is. Simply put, the form … [Read more...]
How platter swelling affects a hard drive
October 8, 2008 By
 Okay, I know this is not about how to read bad parity in a drive in order to find a stale drive in a RAID five. This is an important subject, however, and I also think it is important to know why heat and a swelling platter can cause hard drive … [Read more...]
System Area Of The Hard Disk A Look At A Partition
September 29, 2008 By
So here is the deal, I would say in about 99 percent of the calls I take, I talk about the "System Area Of The Hard Drive" and I am sure that must seem like techno babble to most people. Because of the specialization of this field of technology, a … [Read more...]
My Data Failure Nightmare, The Beginning
September 23, 2008 By
So here is the deal, recently IÂ have been having serious data issues. Like a bad dream it would seem I have lost my main data areas in three different machines in the last 4 months. On a side note one of the machines (my main one) lost its hard … [Read more...]
Partition Types in a Soft Spanned Set
September 22, 2008 By
 Last time I explained the basic premise of a spanned set. I used the example of a clients RAID that contained 3 36 GB SCSI drives. In a standard set each one of the drives would use one partiton for the entire drive and then the set would be … [Read more...]
When good RAIDs Go Bad, A Technicians Worst Nightmare
September 19, 2008 By
The next machine with a bad hard drive was my server. This server has been running as a server in our home for about 8 years. HAH! Now that is not to say that we haven’t done upgrades, because we have. We have always kept the “data†area of the … [Read more...]
What File System Components are affected by FDISK
September 11, 2008 By
As I have mentioned before we have all either by design or by accident fdisked an NTFS file system. In doing so all of the files become inaccessible and the assumption for many years was that they could not be recovered. Many of the more recent … [Read more...]
When My Main Gaming Machine Has Serious Hard Drive Crash
September 9, 2008 By
Ok so here is what I have, 3 broken machines, all with bad hard drives. I am not talking about a little logical damage to the drive where recovery is a possibility with software. Oh no these are full blow physical recoveries. In machine one I have a … [Read more...]
Recovering from Accidental FDISK using Free Software
September 4, 2008 By
Like many of us I have accidentally used 'fdisk' to partition a drive that I had never intended to. Whether it be adding a new drive, repartitioning and formatting a USB device, or just trying to reload the operating system there has been more than … [Read more...]
Use Bad Block Frequency to Determine a RAID 5 Stale Drive
August 11, 2008 By
We have been discussing the love affair I have with stale drives in a RAID five array and how best to determine if in fact one exists. I explained how the NTFS file system data is normally laid out and the fact that the old and new data, as well as … [Read more...]
Determining a Stale Hard Drive in Most RAIDs
August 1, 2008 By
 In my last installment I covered two of the three reasons why we do a parity check.  First we want to make sure that we do not have a stale hard drive in the array. Although I did not cover how one determines if in fact a stale hard drive … [Read more...]
DART XP Data Recovery Software Now Only $49
July 24, 2008 By
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 … [Read more...]
Slave A Laptop Hard Drive To USB
July 6, 2008 By
This article and video will show you how to use a USB enclosure to slave a laptop hard drive. Many times laptop - notebook hard disk drives come in here that we are able to recover with data recovery software. This video will help you use a USB … [Read more...]
Recovering Data From A Laptop
June 2, 2008 By
Last month I purchased a Dell Inspiron 1720 with all the RAM and processing power that I could get. I also picked a 320GB hard drive to store my data files. Being involved with data recovery in one way or another for the last nine years has certainly … [Read more...]