Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Partition Recovery from External Hard Drive

I got two Maxtor hard drives. One is 40 GB and second is 80GB both PATA. On 40 GB hard drive, I have installed the operating system, and 80 GB hard drive is connected as a slave that contains one primary and five absolute logical partitions. I store most of my important data on external hard drive.

One day I used partition resizing software to make some changed in two logical drives of my 80 GB external hard drive (just resized) and I increased the size of my primary bootable partition i. e. “C”.

Now my external hard drive was creating system booting problems because its IDE cable gets damaged. I was stupid that I got my system someway in safe mode and used system restore tool of windows XP operating system and restored the system on previous data before the day I did partition resizing.

When I rebooted my system after restoration, my internal hard drive shown all the partitions up to data but the external hard drive was completely lost.

I ran partition resizing software again and it gave an error and terminated, error was some type of sector. Then I used a bootable CD and used its own partition magic. It helped me to see all the partitions of external hard drive but without any drive letter like C:\ or D:\. It displayed just a star in place of drive letter.

Now I connected my hard drive to another PC, it shown me that I have 80 GB hard drive and it is unallocated. I was much tensioned as I lost all of my important data and backup stored on my external hard drive. I guess the problem has occurred due to partition table corruption and my partitions become invisible.

I searched on Internet to find any partition recovery software to recover my lost logical partition and data on them. After reading one to two websites, I found a partition recovery software called Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery software that is capable to recover the lost logical partitions and data stored on them.

I decided to try this software and downloaded the demo version of the software and installed it. I launched the software and selected the physical hard drive in the left panel of the software where the serial number of my software was given. It popped up a new window with three options. I selected “Search Logical Drive” option to find my lost logical drives first. The software displayed my logical drive after a quick process. I selected the logical drive and scanned it. The scan result displayed all of my lost data. I tried to save the data but it displayed a message to purchase the activation key of the software to save the recovered data.

I purchased it from company’s website and activated the software and recovered my lost data. Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery software works as both partition recover and data recovery software.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

How to Restore Deleted Logical Partition

Hard Drive is the most important storage medium to store precious data. You can store huge amount of data on it and can manage the data and space very easily. To store and manage data effectively, hard drive is divided into two or more partitions. It maximizes the storage space of the drive and helps you to prevent data loss conditions in case of operating system crash. Making multiple partitions offers easy installation of OS to the primary partition and you can store data on other partitions.

The benefit of creating multiple partitions proves helpful in case of disaster; in such situations you can format the primary partition on which the operating system in installed. The other advantage include that you can store one type of data on one logical partition to manage them easily.

FAT (File Allocation Table) and NTFS (New Technology File System) are the two basic partition types used on Windows based computers. Sometimes FAT and NTFS partitions gets deleted or corrupted and become invisible or inaccessible. The partitions may get deleted or corrupted due to some general reasons like

Accidental deletion of partition
Power Surges
Hard Disk failure, crashes
Virus Attacks
When your OS cannot access hard drive

If any of these situations happens, partitions deletion can take place. Due to partition deletion, vital and important data stored on them become invisible or inaccessible. It may create several hardships for the people who are dependant on these lost data.

But there is nothing to worry, your important data still recoverable from lost partitions. You can perform this task using partition recovery software.

Partition recovery software are the application programs designed to restore lost logical partition from the physical drive and then recover lost data from the particular partition. These are advanced software that search the entire physical drive and locate the missing logical drive. After searching the logical drive, you can search for the lost data in normal way as you perform it in case of general data recovery.

In marketplace there is an abundance of Partition Recovery software. Among these software, Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is the most advanced and easy to use partition recovery software. The software provides GUI environment so that the novice user can use them effectively as well as the technical users. The software also provides data recovery from all other possible cases of data loss in windows including accidental deletion, and disk formatting.

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

FAT Partition Recovery

Hard Drive is the most important storage device in your computer to store your precious data. You can store big amount of data on it and can manage the data and space very easily. To store data more effectively, hard disk is divided into several partitions (called logical partitions). These partitions maximize the storage space and help you to prevent data loss conditions in case of operating system crash. Some special methods are used to divide your hard drive into partitions. In windows operating system these methods are FAT and NTFS file systems.

Among FAT and NTFS files systems, FAT is the file system that is most commonly used in computers. It stands for File Allocation Table. It is a table that Operating System maintains on the hard drive that provides a map of clusters. Cluster is the primary unit of logical storage on the hard drive. When you create a new file on a hard drive, it is stored in one or more clusters depending on the file of size.
A partition is divided into the clusters of identical size. The size of the cluster is different depending upon the type of FAT being used and the total size of the partition. Generally its size lies from 2KB to 32 KB. The FAT is the list of entries that map to every cluster on the logical partition. Each entry contains one to these five things:

• The pointer of the next cluster.
• A special EOC (end of cluster chain) entry which indicate the end of chain
• A special entry to indicate the reserved cluster
• A special entry to indicate the bad cluster
• A 0 to show that the particular cluster is unused
There are many different versions of FAT that uses different size for their entries. Its size is indicated by its name, for instance FAT16 uses 16 bits of each cluster entry which FAT32 uses 32 bits. This is the most widely used and most reliable file system in windows operating systems.

Sometimes when you try to access any file from your computer hard drive, it displays an error message- “file *.* not found”. This situation occurs when your FAT table is corrupted or deleted. The corruption in FAT table may occur due to a number of reasons including Operating system corruption, virus attack, importer shut down and accidental deletion of cluster.

If any of these situations occur, it may make your entire logical partition inaccessible and may cause serious data loss. Because when your FAT gets corrupted or deleted, the operating system fails to find the particular file you want to access. This is a very critical and shocking data loss situation for you as you lost all the data stored on the partition. Don’t panic? These data in not irretrievable, it is possible to recover these lost data with the help of advanced technology of data recovery software. In this case you can recover data with the help of FAT data recovery software.

Windows Data recovery software are the logical solutions of recovering you’re lost due to deleted or corrupted File Allocation Table. These software use advanced searching techniques to search the deleted files and display all the recoverable files in a tree format. You can find the required file very easily from this tree and can save them to the specified location.

There are different FAT partition recovery software available in the market. Among all these software, Stellar Phoenix Windows Recovery is simple and easy to use FAT data recovery software. It is a read only and non destructive data recovery software that restore all lost data in their original format.