Saturday, January 30, 2010

Hard Drive Error Checking Technique During Idle Periods

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New drives for notebooks roll off of factory linesImage via Wikipedia

Hard disks have a number of in-built facilities for detecting, correcting, and avoiding the data errors. The hard drive errors may occur because of gradual degradation of a specific location on storage media. It can be possible to detect hard drive bad sector before it reaches to a point where it may lead to data loss. If you do not use disk checking tool on regular basis and any problems with the hard drive leads to data loss, you may have to go for data recovery to retrieve lost data, if an updated backup is not in place.

Since the hard drives use ECC (Error Correction Code) for correcting multiple-bit errors, detecting these errors can help you prevent data loss. However, these methods can do only if the number of incorrect or missing bits is less than a certain threshold. In case if you cannot discover the problem on time, data loss may occur.

To work around this precept, some hard drive manufacturers are integrating routines to perform proactive drive error checking. During the idle periods, logic board of the hard drive carries out reads over disk surface for verifying that data can be accessed without errors. If it encounters any error, the error is generally treated the similar way an error is addressed during user read operation. The data can be rewritten for refreshing it, or the hard drive sector where error is relocated can be remapped.

It is a quite useful reliability characteristic, but may cause confusion sometimes. This scanning process can produce hard drive active sounds, even if the hard drive is not involved with any of the computer operations. If your hard drive is incorporated with this characteristic and you encounter such sounds from the hard drive, there is nothing to worry about. It does not even affect the hard drive performance as the scanning is done only when the hard drive is idle.

Though, these techniques are quite helpful to detect and remove hard drive errors, but they cannot detect errors due to external reasons and cannot prevent data loss. In such circumstances, you need to take help of data recovery solutions.

In case, your hard drive is physically intact and you are experiencing data loss due to logical errors, data recovery software can help you to get your data back. On the other hand, physical data loss situations require special assistance of data recovery service to be cured.

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Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Product Review Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Software

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Windows Data Recovery

This section is totally based on Stellar Phoenix Windows Data recovery Software..

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Software helps you to search, locate and recover all your inaccessible and lost data due to accidental format, software malfunction, file or directory deletion, virus attack, unexpected system shutdown and sabotage.The v 4.1 is equipped with advanced features like Deleted Email Recovery (for both Outlook PST and Outlook Express DBX files) along with Disk Cloning and Drive Status, Photo Recovery etc.


This Data Recovery Software recovers data from Compact Disk (CD) and Digital Versatile Disk (DVD). The software also supports recovery of Photo from all major digital camera. Create image features of the software helps you to recover your data when your hard drive contains bad sectors. It takes the sector by sector image of the specified area of the logical drive.


Whats new in this version:

Version 4.1 may include unspecified updates, enhancements, or bug fixes.

Features:


  • Retrieves all types of files including Excel, Access, PowerPoint, backup files, etc

  • Recovers Deleted Emails from MS Outlook and MS Outlook Express

  • Recovers information about partitions and Volumes

  • Retrieves Photos, Music, Videos

  • Compatible with Windows 7, Vista, 2003, XP and 2000

  • Partition Recovery from FAT, NTFS file systems including FAT32, VFAT, NTFS and NTFS5

  • Performs data recovery operation on USB flash drives, external hard drives, memory cards and Apple iPods

  • Supports 185 different file types

  • Performs Hard Drive Cloning and Imaging

  • Scans hard drive for Drive status and S.M.A.R.T information

  • Available with a Boot CD which can be used to Boot the system if the file system gets crashed or the OS does not start.

  • Updated Flow of Activation method

  • File preview support for files, such as DOT, DOTX, XLT, XLW, XLB, , XLTX, POT, POTX.

  • Separate option for Data Recovery Services.


Pricing:

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery v4.1 software standard single user downloadable edition is available for $99 per license. Companies, IT consultants, Educational institutes can go for our technician, administrator or academic licenses as per there requirement. Companies, Resellers interested in buying the software can visit the website. The free demo version of the product is available to download from company's website http://www.stellarinfo.com/partition-recovery.htm

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Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Computer Crash due to Overheating

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Samsung HD753LJ hard disk drive (750 GB storag...Image via Wikipedia

Computer crash is an unfortunate event, which ranges from unexpected shutdown of applications to “not responding” errors, bringing your computer to a complete state of halt.

A computer crashes due to various reasons but one main reason for crashing of computers is overheating. This further creates disaster, as overheating of computers may lead to hardware failure or sometimes damages or fails the entire hard disk. As a result, you lose all your data stored on the hard drive. However, such hazardous situations can easily be dealt with, using a valid backup file that can be used to restore the data. But various surveys and reports prove that computer users do not tend to take regular backups of their data. So, in these situations, you can simply rely upon hard drive recovery services to ensure complete recovery of your data.

To illustrate this, consider a situation – You are watching a movie or listening to a song on your computer and suddenly the application that is playing the song or movie, closes abruptly. Furthermore, the computer shuts down and on trying to start the computer again, the computer does not even boot up after subsequent attempts too. In the whole process, the thing which comes under threat is your data that is no more accessible to you.

Cause:

The situation stated above might seem confusing, but this is what happens when a computer crashes. In the situation mentioned above, the computer might have crashed due to overheating, which caused all the applications as well as the system to shutdown abruptly.

Due to overheating of computer, the hard drive motor may have to encounter mechanical problems, which may further lead to hard drive damage or failure. If this happens, then you may lose all your hard drive data.

Resolution:

Unfortunately, majority of the people feel helpless in situations like computer crash and do not know what to do. But, it is advised to not do anything to the computer as any mistake might add to the problem and may prove dearer.

The thing which should be done when a computer crashes due to overheating is to consult hard drive data recovery technicians and let them deal with the problem. They are well-educated and experienced technicians who deploy various complex techniques to extract lost, missing or inaccessible data and provide accurate hard disk recovery from damaged or failed hard drives, even in severe cases like overheating.

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Thursday, January 7, 2010

Hardware Failure May Lead to Critical Data Loss Situations

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The computer system is comprise of various physical components, which includes storage devices, processor, input/output devices. The storage devices contains your operating system and applications for performing your desired operations. Though, hardware work as backbone of your computer system, but in some situations, the hardware may fail and render your system unusable. Failure of storage hardware cause more drastic situations or data loss and need data recovery to be handled.

The hardware failure hazards is the most common reason why computer users are suggested to create backup. In fact, nothing jolts you into realizing the significance of the backups more than the unrecoverable hard drive failure or damage. Since the hard drive stores all your data, applications, and operating system, this is the computer hardware component whose failure costs the most. This is something that gets the maximum care, and rightly so.

There are some other computer hardware issues, which may lead to grave data loss situations and some of them may be rather difficult to figure out. Since these problems do not seem like they can cause the issue. Some of these problems are as given below:

  • Memory Errors- As a number of computers are running today without the EDC (Error Detection or Correction) or ECC (Error Correction Code), there are chances of memory errors. Such errors may damage hard drive data structures and corrupt data on the disk. Although, it is quite rare, but when it happens; it cause serious data loss.

  • Resource Conflicts- The conflicts caused by the peripherals, which attempt to use same DMA channels, I/O requests, or interrupt request, can lead to data loss.

  • Power Loss- Power failure can damage your your operating system and other system data structures. This behavior renders all your mission critical and valuable data inaccessible.

In all such cases, you need to opt for data recovery solutions to get your lost data back. If the problem is caused by the physical failure, recovery service is required to retrieve data. Data Recovery Services is the personalized and sophisticated help to extract lost data from physically damaged hard drives.

On the other hand, logical disk failure can easily be handled with the help of data recovery software. These are effective and powerful third-party applications, which methodically scan the affected hard drive and retrieve all data from it.

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