Data Recovery Tools

What is data recovery?

Data recovery as it pertains to personal computers is the process of reacquiring data from a damaged or corrupted magnetic storage devices like hard drives and storage tapes; optical storage devices such as CD's and DVD's; and other secondary data storage types like the flash drives.

Choosing the Right Data Recovery Tools

The first two types of damages are viable for restoration using the operating system's built-in utilities and third party softwares. The third type of failure which is due to physical damage, needs the services of professional data recovery organizations since mechanical and/or electronic failure has to be dealt first prior to data recovery. An example is a failure of a hard disk's platter mechanism. The hard disk compartment enclosing the platter has to be opened on a dust-free (clean-air) environment in order to do the proper repair.

Types of damages

In order to select the right data recovery tools, let us first take a look at the different types of damages and failures.

• File deletion and formatting that erases the data on the storage medium
• File corruption caused by viruses and power glitches
• Physical damage to the storage media including damage caused by mechanical and electronic failure

Related Articles on Data Recovery Tools

MSDART - Data Recovery With Microsoft Diagnostics And Recovery Toolset - Did you lost your files due to virus infections? Or was it the sudden loss of power that wiped out all your documents? John may have inadvertently reformatted the hard drive and your computer would not boot anymore. Disasters come in unexpected times and if you lost your computer data due to the aforementioned causes, you will need a utility that is called MSDART, Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset. Recover data instantly with this utility from Microsoft. Deleted files and reformatted drives are usually recoverable if no further additional damage follows. And MSDART may be able to recover them. MSDART lets you fix a corrupted, unbootable Windows XP or Windows Vista installation. It contains several tools designed specifically for diagnostics and recovery.

Data Recovery after Damage to Hard Drive Head Alignment System - Several computer hard drives contain read/write heads and servo head mounted for concurrent movement by the actuator arm in response to the servo signal from server head. In such drives the positions of read/write heads are separately adjustable with respect to servo head. The complete performance and stability of these drives depend upon the head alignment system. If anything goes wrong with it, read/write heads can not access data from the disk platters and critical data loss occurs. In order to overcome these issues, you are required to opt for Hard Drive Recovery solutions.

Data Recovery When The Hard Drive Initialization Fails - The computer hard drive is a primary data storage device, which is used for permanent and reliable data storage. Hard drive stores digital information on moving hard drive platters. But in some situations, your BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) can not recognize your hard drive and thus the system does not boot up. Such kind of problems generally take place due to physical error in the hard drive and cause serious data loss circumstances. At this point, the Hard Drive Recovery comes for you help to salvage lost, missing and inaccessible data from affected hard drive.

Laptop Hard Drive Data Recovery How-To - Foreword and a warning: Putting a screwdriver to your laptop and pulling out the hard drive will often void the warranty, if you still have one. Actual, hands-on laptop hard drive repair (meaning you open the drive and poke around in it) can't be done without a considerable amount of expertise and access to the proper tools. In this article we'll instead take a look at other things that you can try to recover data from a failing or broken hard drive. Even these methods can be risky though, so if you use the tips described below, you do so at your own risk. So, with that said let's move on to the tips.