Hard
disks are treated as reliable
non-volatile storage and
it is quite disastrous to
find out files are gone
with backup copies outdated.
Despite the obvious data
still can be recovered,
often in-house without sending
the disk to the repair facility.
Two
classes of widely available
data recovery tools exist:
1. In-Place Repair tools
attempting to correct the
damage and restore the defective
disk to some working condition.
Most well-known examples
are ScanDisk shipped with
Windows and Norton Disk
Doctor (part of the Norton
Utilities, www.symantec.com).
2. Read-Only recovery tools
which do not even attempt
to modify the damaged disk
but rather concentrate on
getting data off it, examples
being ZAR32 (www.z-a-recovery.com)
and R-Studio (www.r-tt.com).
The latter approach eliminates
the risk of further damaging
the drive (imagine repairs
done wrong rendering remaining
data useless) but requires
a separate well-working
logical drive or better
a separate hard disk. This
is because you need to store
recovered data somewhere
but rules of the game forbid
modifications to the damaged
disk.
Low-level
disk editors being an entirely
different class of tools
are used in manual repairs
but one needs really deep
technical knowledge to use
them efficiently.
The
efficiency of recovery depends
upon approach the particular
software uses and its applicability
to the particular damage
type. Read-only tools are
beneficial from this point
of view as you can try and
compare several utilities
to find out the best among
them.
Physical
damage to the disk should
be handled differently:
if you smash the hard disk
with a huge hammer it will
quit working and the software
is just not going to repair
it. Such a situation usually
manifests itself in distinctive
grinding or clicking sounds
form the device. In this
case you need to send the
disk to a data recovery
center – hopefully
they can handle it with
their equipment. Furthermore,
attempting in-house repair
of the physcially affected
disk can induce further
damage.
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