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How to recover lost data from the hard drive after unformat drive error

Topic: SoftwarePublished May 17, 2012

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Nowadays, almost all electronic devices use storage devices to store large amount of data. Hard drives are also one of the most commonly used storage devices. Although hard drives are more susceptible to mechanical failures than portable storage devices, they are still being used by many people and popular to store large amount of data. Hard drives can able store up to 2TB (Tera Bytes) of data. Hard disk stores data in binary form i.e. in 0’s and 1’s. The data stored on the hard disk is organized by the file system. FAT (File Allocation Table) and NTFS (New Technology File System) are the two major types of file system. File system stores the allocation information of files and it shows available location to store new data. Sometimes, due to some reasons file system may become corrupt, which leads to data stored on the hard drive become inaccessible. In such a case, you may get unformat drive error while trying to access the hard drive data. However, do not worry since it is possible to recover lost data from corrupted hard drive by using good hard drive recovery software.

Sometimes, Improper shut down, power surge problems and system crash etc may cause data loss. Sometimes, when you try to open a file, it may display an error message like “File allocation error due to cross linked files”, which is due to improper system shut down. Cross-linked files are entries in file allocation table which points to same clusters. When files are cross-linked, then you need to delete both the files which are cross-linked which may lead to data loss. Sometimes, defragmentation process may fail resulting in data loss. Generally, files are stored in unsorted manner i.e. some part of the file is stored in some location and continuation part of that file is stored in some other location. When you try to open that file, disk has to read that files from different storage location, which decreases the system performance. So, to increase the system performance, defragmentation is necessary. If you are having more data on a disk, defragmentation takes more time to sort the data. In such situation, if power failure occurs, then the defragmentation process gets interrupted, which may lead to severe data loss.

So, before defragmentation you are supposed to create backup of important data. Do not copy or save any new data over the affected disk to avoid further data loss. Because, saving or copying any new data on disk may overwrite the data, which leads to permanent data loss beyond the recovery. Try to use recovery software, which do not perform any write operations while recovering the lost data.

Remo Recover (Windows) Pro edition is capable of recovering data which is lost due to file system corruption. This software scans the complete hard disk and recovers lost data. By using this software you recover lost data from different types of hard drives like SATA, SCSI and IDE. Demo version of this software is available for download on the internet that allows you to preview the recovered data.

Article author

About the Author

David Williams is a researcher working on disaster management and data recovery. As part of his research he has published many articles on disaster management, loss of data during disasters, correct backup practices and using data recovery software. He devotes his free time to help people affected by data loss to recover files after getting unformat drive error and to perform hard drive recovery.

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