An ancient proverb says:

"The question is not if your hard drive will fail, but when..."

Recently, I've personally verified this truth. A repeated series of power outages had been wreaking havoc on my system drive, resulting in two unreadable partitions and minor disc surface damage.

Of course, I did have backups of all truly critical data. But I wasn't going to let go of my mp3 collection - not considered critical data - that easily. Fortunately, I had access to PowerQuest's Lost & Found, a powerful data recovery utility.

Some Data Recovery Basics

My data had apparently vanished - the partitions had completely disappeared from Windows' file explorer. However, being fairly familiar with disk drives, I knew there wasn't any reason to panic. As long as the disk will still spin, any data is most likely to be recovered.

In order for a computer to read files from a disk, it must know where the files are located. For this purpose, any disk or partition has a so called FAT (File Allocation Table). If the FAT gets corrupted, the computer will refuse to read the disk or even think it doesn't exist at all. And this was exactly what had happened.

Data recovery programs like Lost & Found do not strictly need the FAT in order to read the data. They work by reading the entire disk and keeping track of whatever they find. Data is normally written to a disk in chunks of fixed size called clusters. If a file is made up of more than one cluster - most files are - these are not necessarily adjacent or in sequential order. Without a FAT, the operating system cannot make much out of these chunks of data. A data recovery utility however, having read the entire disk, can string all those clusters back together and assemble them into files again. This is, simply stated, how Lost & Found works its magic.

Enter: Lost & Found (Cue: theme from 007)

Having taken my troubled drive to a friend who happens to have the right tools - see also my review on SpinRite - we'd chosen to use Lost & Found for the recovery of the unreadable partitions. Like most similar utilities, Lost & Found is to be run under DOS, in this case from a set of floppies. In order to be able to recover the files, there must be another physical (hard) drive in the system with sufficient storage space: Lost & Found will not write recovered data back onto the affected drive even if it has other partitions that are still OK. If the machine is part of a network, the destination drive may be any available network drive.

Operation

Thus, the machine containing the troubled drive was booted up from the first floppy, whereupon the program fired itself up and asked for the second. Finished loading, the program then presented the splash screen and a series of text mode menus for entering which drive you want to recover data from, and to which drive recovered data should be written. This completed, the program starts scanning the affected drive.

The scan will obviously take some time. In this case, on a 6.4 GB drive, the scan took about 20 minutes. During scanning, operational statistics are shown on the screen along with the usual "progress bar".
Done with the scan, the program enters the analysis phase, which in this case lasted about 10 minutes. Then, finally, the result screen displays the entire content of the drive. One can choose to not display individual files - recommended option since there may be tens of thousands of them - and instead display directories only.
Results are shown in the usual - though somewhat simplified - file tree form, with a color coding that tells you which items can be easily recovered (green), may be (yellow) or unlikely (red). Additional color coding indicates items that have been recovered, those marked for recovery, empty directories and such.
Note that the result screen will show also files that had been deleted - whether intentionally or not - since a deleted file is really anything but. Simply stated, a deleted file is not physically removed from the disk. However, the space it occupies is being flagged as available for writing other files - so eventually they may disappear but not until they're actually overwritten. Even reformatting a drive will not physically delete the files it contains, though it will make their recovery a bit more difficult.

Browsing the results screen, items may be marked for recovery or singled out for inspection. Obviously, all commands are to be entered through the keyboard - mouse addicts will have to temporarily kick the habit. A Help screen containing the color code legend and keyboard commands is available at all times. A nice feature is the built-in file viewer - essentially a text/hexadecimal viewer - allowing for inspection of individual files.

Having decided upon which files to recover - this may take quite some time - the recovery can be started and the program will read the files to be recovered, writing them to the designated destination drive. Removable media drives such as zips or even floppys could be used for this purpose, but using a second hard drive is definitely faster. One can choose whether or not to preserve directory structure of recovered files.

After having recovered a set of files, one can always go back and decide to recover other files if required - but once you quit, you'll have to start all over again. So take your time and be thorough - better safe than sorry.

Mission Accomplished

With the recovered files now sitting safely on your destination drive, you might think you're done. Well, nearly but not quite. Since the recovery program runs under DOS, it cannot write long filenames - all file and directory names will have the usual 8 character limit. Now, most people have become used to using longer - more significant - names for files and directories, so the recovered files will be named quite differently from what you'd expect, and this will wreak havoc if you have a shortcut or link pointing to such a file. But don't worry - you won't have to rename all your files by hand as this has been taken care of. Along with your recovered files, on the destination drive you'll find a log file and a file called "longname.bat". The latter file contains all the original long filenames tied to the names that have been assigned to the recovered files. A separate utility that is run under Windows will use this information to automatically restore the original filenames.

Thanks to Lost & Found, my personal hard drive crash horror story had a happy ending. All the affected files - part of my reference library and all of my mp3 collection - had been successfully recovered with the minimum of hassle. However, be aware that good file system maintenance and a certain knowledge of file systems are essential for this type of operations to be successful. If your data files are scattered across all of your drive - 20GB, single partition - you might be in for some grief when attempting a similar operation, and probably you won't be able to pull it off without the help of a more experienced buddy. Also, there always is a chance recovery won't be successful for some reason - backing up critical data remains essential. So you'd better get organized, just in case.

Conclusion:

Lost & Found does what it promises, and an experienced user will not have any problems at all in most cases. As the damage done to my drive was not really severe, it was an easy job. However, my friend who offered the use of his machine - and thus the program - reported successful data recovery from drives that had been reformatted by a virus, and even from drives that had suffered severe damage at hardware level. And I don't think he was just bragging. So if your data seems to have vanished or your drive makes funny noises while your computer fails to boot, don't panic. Get hold of a copy of Lost & Found - after all, seventy bucks are a modest price to pay compared to the cost of enlisting a data recovery service.





Recommended: Yes