Having read current article you will find a great deal of information about hard drive recovery and other procedures performed to save data. No one is immune against the information loss. Even great corporations which expend great deals of money on modern systems often ask for help of professionals.
In case you asked for assistance of some expert he would say that it is not reasonable to store all the important information just on the HDD as it is simply to lose it. Unlike CDs and other kinds of data carriers HDD is a mechanism that wears out as any other mechanical system. If there is a mechanical failure sometimes it is impossible to restore any data as HDD gets completely invalid.
The operators that attempted to work out any HDD problems with Windows 98 or earlier systems resorted to usage of fdisk utility and some other primitive systems. Today the usage of such solutions even by truly experienced users may lead to irreversible consequences.
File systems
The technique of storing and spreading the information on the HDD is usually determined by a file system. There are some sectors which are called partitions on the HDD. The most spread file systems which are used by Windows are NTFS (NT File System) and FAT (File Allocation Table). FAT is earlier system that was used in DOS as FAT-16 and in Windows 9x/ME as FAT-32. FAT-32 was produced on the principles of operating of FAT-16 but it can serve more information. That is difficult to believe that people utilized FAT-16 and had disks not bigger than 2 GB. In modern versions of Windows the main system is NTFS but it may easily work with FAT without complexities.
Windows NT, XP and 2000 utilize NTFS system as it offers significantly greater level of safety of info storage. The other significant advantage is that operator may establish personal access rights for any file. All such systems utilize disk partition table and boot record which are stored in the initial sector of every disk and determine which one is boot disk. If the information in MBR is unreadable computer won't boot at all and some partitions can be described as empty.
Data recovery
The main rule you ought to never depart from is not to write on the lost information if you want to perform ntfs recovery. If you have deleted the needed partition and created the new one you shouldn't take any measures at all. The identical actions should be performed if you accidentally deleted any significant data from the recycle bin. The data is not erased, it is still on the disk until you overwrite such with some new data.
The most uncomfortable case is when your HDD has just one partition. In these instances we ought to use some other computer to operate with the HDD. It is more comfortable to operate the HDD form other computer.
Data recovery utilities
If you don't have an opportunity to replace the disk do not be tempted and do not install new operating system. To execute any actions you need to boot special operating system that is commonly used exactly in such cases.
There are some freeware programs but usually they are not so effective as shareware recovery software. You can easily find the appropriate correspondence of prices and quality and utilize nice program not overpaying for it.