Retrieve a File from a Hard Drive
Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011What must you do if you must retrieve an erased file from the hard drive or a flash memory card? You should write the retrieved file to another disk as it is better to do so. When the file size is small, you can use a floppy disk. Otherwise, you can write the file to a different drive letter on the same hard drive. You can perform this task using Norton Disk Editor. Norton Disk Editor is part of the Norton Utilities and Norton SystemWorks that can be used to retrieve lost data.
Disk Editor is a command prompt program designed primarily to access FAT-based file system such as FAT12 (floppy disk), FAT 16 (MS-DOS), and FAT 32 (Windows 98). 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. To avoid making any accidental modifications to the hard disk when you are executing data recovery tasks you must set Disk Editor to default Read-only mode.
The process of locating the file is as below:
- Identify the cluster (allocation unit) size of the drive where the file is located.
- Run the Disk Editor to check out the name of the erased file and identify which clusters have the file data.
Since the retrieved file would be restored to another drive, it is not necessary to restore the original filename. Nonetheless it will be a good idea to make certain that the clusters do contain the necessary data. Before retrieving any file, you have to use Norton Disk Editor to see and determine the beginning and ending clusters of the file. If you are retrieving file from a formatted drive, this is an important step that you must do.
To copy the contents of clusters to a file safely, it is best to specify the sectors that have the file. You can use Disk Editor to determine the sector number and also the cluster number.
Other recovery software REMO Recover provide user friendly and slick interface. Remo recover is a strong recovery software that uses efficient scanning algorithms for data recovery. The software has components that 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.