Reading this text you will search out a huge amount of data about hard drive recovery and some actions executed to restore data. That is really big problem today as the amount of data saved on disks is rapidly growing and it is difficult to manage all the information appropriately.

Professionals announce that HDD is not actually the best place to store some important info as there is a probability that it would be lost soon. Unlike CDs and other kinds of data carriers HDD is a mechanical system which wears out like any other mechanical system. If there is a mechanical failure sometimes that is not possible to restore any information as HDD gets fully unworkable.

In case you have been operating in computers field at least for several years you ought to remember that one of the most popular programs of data recovery was fdisk. Nowadays the use of such programs even by really well skilled operators may lead to irreversible consequences.

File systems

The technique of saving and spreading the data on the HDD is usually defined by a file system. Free space is divided on some partitions with definite logical drives within. Even not very well-skilled user may easily announce that there are two sorts of file systems and remembers their codes NTFS (NT File System) and FAT (File Allocation Table). FAT is earlier system which was used in DOS as FAT-16 and in Windows 9x/ME as FAT-32. In case we compare these two systems we will find that FAT-32 can operate with bigger amounts of data. It is hard to believe that users utilized FAT-16 and had disks not greater than 2 GB. Operating systems Windows 2000 and Windows XP are can work with FAT system meanwhile FAT is not the primary system.

The main reason why modern versions of Windows operate with NTFS as a primary system is that it has nicer level of safety. Moreover NTFS permits to determine access rights for any single file. The most significant part of information for the OS is the boot record and disk partition table which are located in the initial sector of every disk. System won't work properly and OS won't start in case there are some troubles with this data.

Data recovery

The first rule you ought to never depart from is not to overwrite the lost data if you are going to execute partition recovery. Surely there are some system operations which are performed by the OS but that won't impact the restore result. If you erased something that was saved in recycle bin and you understood that you need that data do not add any information on the HDD. Erased files are just hidden but they are still stored on the disk. They will be finally deleted.

There may be some extra problems in case your HDD contains only one partition. In these cases we ought to use some other computer to operate with the HDD. Operation with the other computer has got many advantages.

Data recovery utilities

Lots of operators attempt to reinstall the operating system at once when they have got any troubles with HDD but it isn't right. There are some software programs which permit you to boot the computer under the control of the some special operating system.

There are lots of sites in the Internet which offer you to get shareware or freeware programs that may help you to execute file recovery. The market is full of great propositions and such type of programs is believed to be inexpensive.