Partition Recovery Concepts
What to do when:
- - Partition is not visible (disk is attached, but you don't see a drive letter in file explorer)
- - Partition is not accessible (volume is visible, but OS pops up an error when accessing it)
- - Partition is not bootable (Operating System fails to start properly)
What are the most common causes of partition issues:
- - Physical damage of critical sectors on a HDD (known as unreadable or 'bad sectors')
- - Loss of information due to an electrical failure or power surge
- - Accidental deletion of the logical drive/partition
- - Accidental formatting of the logical disk/partition
- - Damage of the MBR, Partition Table, Volume Boot Sectors by a software virus or malware
- - Improper use or execution failures of backup/recovery software tools
When the volume is damaged it usually displays one of the following symptoms:
- - Original partition/drive is no longer visible to the Operating System (deleted, damaged, or overwritten)
- - Partition/Volume is visible but important files/folders are not visible (drive re-formatted or damaged)
In both cases partition recovery software must analyze the surface of the physical
drive for residual logical data and organization clues in order to reconstruct
the partition/drive parameters (such as the first sector number, cluster
size, file system type, etc.). After a user obtains an access to this virtual drive, he is able to re-create
partition (recover partition information) or just to copy lost data to another drive (with use of a file recovery program).
Examples of low level partition damage and recovery procedures
We assume that you have some knowledge of a HDD and the File System's organization to be able to understand the recovery terminology and examples.
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