Tag: disk recovery

There are plenty of software tools that claim to recover data from damaged and corrupted disks, after accidental format, deletion, repartitioning or crash. Some of them are free, and some cost well over a thousand dollars. But are these tools worth it? Read my story of trying different data recovery software to save data from a constantly degrading hard disk.

It all started with a Windows crash. The blue-screen occurred literally from the blue sky. After rebooting and trying to open a Word document I was working on, I’ve got a corrupted file. There wasn’t much text typed, so I simply created a new one and went on.

However, the problem persisted. I started getting intermittent crashes every once in a while, every time with more and more corruption. Running scandisk found and recovered multiple ‘lost’ chunks that were essentially useless. What’s worse, I started seeing ‘bad’ sectors in the scandisk reports. Slowly, I began realizing that there might be something wrong with the hard disk.

I would probably be realizing the problem for some more time, but one day the system simply didn’t boot after a crash. Booting from the Windows installation DVD, I was able to do some repairs to the disk that didn’t make it boot anyways. So I went ahead and bought another disk to replace the failed one.

And then I realized a small problem. You see, I am writing a lot of texts in Microsoft Word, having over a thousand documents sitting on the hard drive, and that’s not accounting for family photo archives and occasional Excel spreadsheets. I thought it would be a pity to lose all of this data, and started exploring my options.

Did you ever try firing the “data recovery” queue in Google? You get a whole bunch of ads and SEO-optimized sites offering all sorts of stuff. Obviously, the first results lead to data recovery services. Ouch: expensive! Maybe I could try it myself, I thought, with something like data recovery software. The “data recovery software” search returned more of what I considered appropriate. Let’s try the free stuff, I thought, and downloaded a free undelete tool. Nah; didn’t even find any of my files. Obviously, there’s something wrong with the file system. So I tried another data recovery software, and another one, and yet another one, with similar results. Suddenly, one of the tools could actually see my files! I clicked on one of the files, and immediately saw a preview of one of my Word documents. I went online and paid for that data recovery software. Needless to say I had all of my documents saved to the new disk in less than an hour!

The data recovery software I successfully used to recover my documents and digital pictures is called Disk Recovery Wizard. You can get a copy of Disk Recovery now. It could successfully locate my Office documents and digital pictures on a hard disk with a corrupted and then ‘repaired’ file system by scanning the surface of the disk and looking for byte signatures typical for documents and digital pictures. This turned to be an effective process that saved me hour of work and years of memories. Warmly regarded and highly recommended!

How many different tools for hard disk recovery do you need? One for recovering files and data, another one to fix NTFS partitions, and yet another one if you have a FAT volume? Combine all three hard disk recovery tools into a single product! Disk Recovery Wizard is just perfect for hard disk recovery specialists and novice computer users, introducing a great deal of automation and a perfectly usable interface to the hard disk recovery process.

The wizard-based interface makes hard disk recovery a simple and straightforward process. Your only job is clicking the ‘Next’ button and making a few adjustments to better aim the program at your mission.

What if you simply deleted a file or document? Add another useful recovery tool to the list of freebies you get with Disk Recovery Wizard! Document recovery is a special feature found in Disk Recovery Wizard. Even if your hard disk is half-dead and inaccessible, Disk Recovery Wizard can still salvage your Office documents such as Word files, Excel spreadsheets or PowerPoint presentations by running a full-scale investigation of the faulty hard drive in order to find the documents. The investigation works similarly to antivirus software and applies signature-based detection patterns to locate the documents.

Disk Recovery Wizard always recovers the right document by displaying a pre-recovery Live Preview. If you see a preview, there’s a 100% guarantee that you’ll be able to recover that file!

What about digital pictures? Disk Recovery Wizard recovers your family photo albums and digital images from hard disks and digital cameras altogether! Solid-state memory such as USB flash drives and memory cards used in modern digital cameras are quite robust, but still fail when used in harsh conditions. The majority of memory cards used in digital cameras, with an exception of a few expensive Extreme-range Secure Digital and Compact Flash cards made by SanDisk, are not certified for use in below-zero environments. Harsh weather conditions when shooting outdoors often cause malfunctions of inexpensive memory cards, which in turn results in data loss. A typical situation is a blank memory card after a significant number of shots.

Fortunately, most of the time your digital pictures are still there, and can be recovered at home when the card gets warmer. Just make sure not to shoot anything with the card in question in order to avoid overwriting the lost images. Disk Recovery Wizard analyzes the contents of the memory card, locates digital images by their signatures, and recovers the pictures. The usual Live Preview feature works marvelously with the digital images regardless of their format. Shooting RAW? Disk Recovery Wizard supports RAW files by most manufacturers, allowing the most demanding photographers benefit from using the picture recovery tool!