Information on File Recovery on a Hard Drive
If you have to retrieve an deleted file from the hard drive or a flash memory card, what can you do? It is safer to write the retrieved file to another disk. You can use a floppy disk if the file size is small. Alternatively, the retrieved file can be written to a different drive letter on the same hard drive. Norton Disk Editor, part of the Norton Utilities and Norton SystemWorks, lets you to perform such tasks.
Disk Editor is created mainly to access FAT-based systems such as FAT12, FAT 16, and FAT 32. It is a command prompt program. If the Windows NT, Windows 2000, or Windows XP is installed on a FAT32 partition or hard drive, you could use Disk Editor to carry out data recovery task. Disk Editor could work on NTFS volumes provided it is running in physical sector mode. If you need to get back data from a hard drive and copy the data to another location, you must set Disk Editor to default Read-Only mode to avoid making any unintentional modifications to the hard disk.
The location of the file is determined using following process:
- Find out the cluster (allocation unit) size of the drive on which the file is located.
- To view the name of the removed file and determine which clusters that have the file data, you have to run the Disk Editor.
As the retrieved file would be restored to another drive, it is not essential to restore the original filename. However it will be a good idea to make sure that the clusters do contain the needed data. Before retrieving any file, you should use Norton Disk Editor to see and identify the beginning and ending clusters of the file. This is particularly essential if you want to recover files from formatted drive.
The sectors that have the file must be specified if you want to copy the contents of clusters to a file safely. The sector number and the cluster number will be shown in Disk Editor.
You could find non command prompt data recovery program such as REMO Recover. The software has simple to use and slick interface. Remo recover is a strong recovery software that uses effective scanning algorithms for data recovery. The software has components which permit you to recover files from formatted drive. You can also use it to recover files from USB drive and recover files from SD card.