Last month, we examined some solutions aimed at checking hard drive hardware. This month, we look at help with software.

Some software can be used to recover data from a crashed hard drive, but there is a caveat: The level of success depends on how clean your drive is. If you don't defragment your drive on a regular basis, files can be scattered all over the drive. This makes recovery much harder. It may make recovery impossible. The answer is to keep your drive defragmented. Not only will it improve your chances of data recovery in the event of a crash, but it will keep your system operating at top speed.

1. Know your MBR

What kind of damage can these programs fix? Mainly, you can recover programs that suffered problems with the file directory or its structure. If a drive is not bootable, it may be simply a matter of rebuilding the Master Boot Record (MBR), which contains the code to start the machine. If this is the case, the DOS command utility FDISK can be used to rebuild the MBR. The command should be issued from a boot floppy or the recovery console as follows:

FDISK /MBR

For more information on the /MBR, visit the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

You can also use the FIXMBR program available from the recovery console. Boot the Windows distribution CD, select the recovery console option and from the command prompt type:

FIXMBR

and hit the enter key.

2. The dreaded "invalid system disk" message

If you start your system and see the message "invalid system disk," your boot files may have been corrupted. Verify that your hard drive is recognized properly in CMOS (the setup area of your computer) and then boot from a startup diskette or boot to the recovery console and issue the command:

SYS C:

Restart your system. If it boots, you're back in business. Schedule a backup as soon as possible to avoid problems in the future.

If the above steps don't work, or if your system hangs when starting, you need stronger tools. One of the best that I have used over the years is Acronis Disk Director Suite.

Disk Director Suite does a lot of stuff including a boot disk manager as well as a non-destructive partition manager (non-destructively resize partitions) but more importantly in the case of a crashed drive it allows you to recover deleted, damaged or lost partitions.

3. Get your data out

Still dead in the water? Your last gasp would be to check out Hard Disk Regenerator (aka HDD Regenerator). It seeks out bad sectors, a common cause of failure, and many times it can correct them or at least put them out of service. It's really a pretty amazing bit of code.

If HDD Regenerator doesn't do the trick you're probably totally out of luck and looking at trying to recover any data from the drive that hasn't been backed up so you can restore it to a new drive. Until recently you were out of luck, the only option was to turn over the drive to a data recovery company that was going to charge you an arm and a leg to extract it.

Fortunately there is now a "at home" solution in the form of Selkie Rescue. I'll spare you the long winded version and let you read the review but the short version is that it allows you to access the dead driver over a network and (hopefully) extract files.

It doesn't work in all cases; if the drive is totally dead with a bad platter or read/write head it won't do you any good and you'll need to spend the big bucks with a data recovery company who will take the drive apart but it's a good option to try before you shell out the big bucks.

Corrections, amplifications, mea culpas, and late additions

In last month's newsletter I wrote that it wasn't possible to read a FAT32 partition in Windows NT. Wrong! At Winternals Software you'll find a FAT32 file system driver for Windows NT 4.0 ($39). Or check out Systems Internals' free, read-only driver.

To clarify my comment about reading a FAT32 partition in DOS: I was tripped up by my own cleverness. Indeed, you can read a FAT32 partition from the Windows command prompt. Being old and crusty, I said DOS--but meant the old, non-Windows version of DOS. My apologies if this caused any confusion.

Until next month, best in computing.

Part 1

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