“Hey, what’s going on here.” You can’t believe your luck as you struggle with one problem or another. Now it is your computer’s turn to poke you where it hurts most. “Ouch!” You look at the blank screen of death depicted on your monitor, knowing it’s bad because you have that sinking feeling in your stomach. You have so much information on this computer. Your work files, your family pictures, everything. How are you going to fix this? Then you remember your friends talking about data recovery software.
You can use data recovery software when errors occur in the hard drive resulting in data loss. The market has several brands of data recovery software today, all with their pros and cons. Shareware or Freeware utilities make up most of them, but there are several high quality commercial products.
Don’t use a data recovery program on your hard drive if you know it’s damaged. Also, you should get your computer to your local computer repair shop if the drive makes strange noises you do not recognize. Continuing to use a damaged hard drive could further damage it, possibly making your lost data unrecoverable.
Data recovery software uses two main techniques to fix errors in the file systems. These errors prevents you from gaining access to your files. Forensic experts call the first technique consistency checking. Here the program scans the logical structure of the file system looking for differences such as missing or unexpected outcomes. In other words, if there is something abnormal, the program will flag it for you to explore further.
You may know about Microsoft’s CHKDSK and ScanDisk utilities. The Linux file system consistency check (or FSCK) is an equivalent one. These utilities usually run at startup, checking for errors caused by improperly shutting down your computer. However, the file system consistency checking does not work on badly damaged system files.
