CnW will perform hard drive data recovery on all types of disk, NTFS, FAT, even Macintosh. All modern physical disks can be handled, such as IDE, SCSI, USB, SATA, Firewire, and drives from laptop computers. The cost is very reasonable, starting at £75, and for many typical drives is £100 - £200. Recovery is either onto DVDs, or for higher capacity, we supply a new USB drive.

The way that data is recovered from a hard disk tends to vary with each particular drive. The first stage is often to establish how badly the disk is damaged or corrupted and this is partly done by viewing some sectors. The most important sector to start with is the boot sector at the star of the disk, if corrupted, it will be impossible for a PC to open the drive. If a drive has been reformatted the a PC will not see the original files, but the CnW Recovery software can restore most, if not all of the files that were on the disk before the reformatting took place.

The next series of tests will be used to determine how damaged the drive is and a physical scan will indicate the number and location of any failed sectors. If it is suspected that the drive is failing, then the best approach is to image the drive onto another disk so that there is a secure backup of all remaining data.

Many apparent drive failures are due to corruption, rather than hardware, so again it is useful to see what can be read by normal means and what other approaches may be required. For instance, for a FAT disk, if the FAT map is still valid, this can be extremely useful, even if the root directory has been cleared down. Other tests can be used to see if remaining directory stubs are in valid locations. The recovery process can work so previously deleted files are recovered, or ignored.

The following process are typical in any recovery process

• Attempt standard file reading
• Check partition tables
• Read the files, but ignore the FAT - typically assume contiguous files
• Search for directory stubs, and restore files
• Verify directories are in valid locations
• All else fails, read raw data and search for file starts

Partitions. A hard disk drive can be divided into multiple partitions - up to a maximum of 4(or more on NTFS). Each partition acts like a separate drive, though obviously it is still the same drive. A major problem can occur if the information describing the partitions, which is stored in sector 0 of the disk, is lost. CnW can reconstruct that data and so restore data that is on any partition.

CnW can restore from all standard types of drive

• IDE - including 2.5” laptop drives
• SCSI
• USB
• Serial-ATA 3.5” and 2.5”
• Firewire

Lewes East Sussex UK