Archive for March, 2010

Mar 29 2010

Hard Drive Doesn’t Boot, But Can Be Accessed If Booted From Floppy


Is your Windows hard drive refusing to boot up when you start your computer? Can you boot your system using a floppy disk without any problem? The problem may occur due to missing or damaged boot files on your Windows hard drive. Corruption may occur due to numerous reasons such as virus infection and improper system shutdown. In such cases, all your hard drive data may become inaccessible and you may face critical data loss. You need to restore valuable data from a complete backup. However, if the backup is not available, hard drive recovery becomes need of hour.

When a hard drive refuses to boot in such cases, you can boot the system using a bootable floppy disk and can access the disk using third-party disk utility software. After booting the system, you can run disk repair utility, like ChkDsk tool, to detect and fix hard drive errors.

Cause

Generally, when Windows hard drive can not be detected in BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) but accessed normally after booting the system using floppy, it implies a problem with logical components of the drive. The most common cause of this problem is a damaged boot sector or a boot sector virus.

Resolution

Try the below methods to fix the problem and perform hard drive data recovery:

  • Reboot the hard drive

  • Scan your hard drive using an updated anti-virus software. If the problem is due to a boot sector, it can help you to sort the issue.

  • Set the system or boot partition as ‘active’, if you are changing the hard drive partitions. Else, you can not boot from primary partition.

  • Boot your system in Recovery Console and fix a damaged boot sector, if it has been corrupted by a virus or some other reason.

  • Put your DOS partition as the first partition, if you are configuring your system as dual-boot.

If none of the above methods work, you need to format the hard drive and reinstall operating system to fix damaged boot sector. However, formatting removes all the data from hard drive and creates need of hard drive recovery.

You can successfully recover lost hard drive data using third-party hard drive data recovery software. The applications use efficient scanning methods to ensure absolute recovery in all cases of data loss.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is the most excellent solution for all kinds of data loss. The software is compatible with Microsoft Windows 7, Vista, 2003, XP, and 2000. It supports recovery from NTFS5, NTFS, FAT32, VFAT, and FAT16 file system partitions.

No responses yet

Mar 23 2010

Recover data from inaccessible, corrupt or damaged CDs


Have you ever faced problems copying the content from a CD to your computer’s hard drive? You can see the content but cannot go ahead with the copying is often a case while dealing with CDs. The CD won’t perform the copying function in case of corruption and physical damage. If a disc is not severely damaged, the contents can be accessed by adopting following steps:

  • A dirty disc cannot be read correctly, thus try cleaning it with a soft cloth

  • Try the disc in some other computer as some CD drives are capable of forgiving minor disc errors

  • Save the data on the other computer and transfer it to yours via a USB or you can use Internet (If the data is not too bulky)

  • Check the drive cables on your machine

If all the above steps fail, then there is something seriously wrong with the disc. In order to retrieve data, one should go for a proficient CD ROM data recovery tool.

These applications are capable of recovering data from CD ROMs, CD-Rs, CD-RWs in various data loss situations including:

  • Volume descriptor damage

  • TOC (Table of contents) gets damaged

  • Disc is corrupt or has signs of physical damage like scratches, bubbles etc

  • Disc appears blank or appears as audio disc

  • Disc is full error which renders data inaccessible

CD ROM data recovery is possible even in a scenario when the computer freezes after inserting a CD. In the past it was very difficult to recover data that may have been lost on a CD, but with advancement in technology, extracting data from a corrupt CD has become a cakewalk.

Stellar Phoenix CDRom Data recovery is a dependable application which performs recovery from the damaged CDROM, CD-R and CD-RW. The CDRom data recovery software recovers data from CDs built on all Windows, Linux and UNIX Operation Systems. The tool boasts of various features which includes creating an image file of damaged or defective CD, file masking, file unmasking and file filter.

Be it recovering data from a disc with scratches or an inaccessible CD or a disc with multiple sessions of writing, the tool is an all-in-one solution.

No responses yet

Mar 17 2010

Tips to Solve Mac OS X Error: ‘The volume Macintosh HD was found corrupt…’

In case your Mac OS computer won’t boot properly, running disk repair utility can help to correct the problem. Also, this utility can be used to check for file system inconsistencies, even if your Mac OS X computer boots just fine. This disk repair utility includes two tools- fsck and Disk Utility. Problems, which are unfixable by Disk Utility, are usually solved by command line utility- fsck. But if fsck also fails, you may fall in undesired situations of data loss and need of mac data recovery as the last resort is to perform erase and install.

 

Following is a scenario that illustrates the similar kind of problem, as stated above. Suppose you use Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and run Disk Utility. It reports some file system errors indicating that the file system is not in good state. At the end of error report, you encounter the below mentioned error messages:

 

The volume Macintosh HD was found corrupt and needs to be repaired.
Error: This disk needs to be repaired. Start up your computer with another disk (such as your Mac OS X installation disc), and then use Disk Utility to repair this disk.

 

Though you may be able to correct this issue for sometime, but the problem repeats.

 

Cause

 

Such problems are the direct consequence of events like, power interruption, forced restart, or unexpected shutdown.

 

Solution

 

In order to solve the depicted problem, you should do the following steps:

 

  • Insert the Snow Leopard install disc and start the computer while holding the C key

  • Select ‘Disk Utility’ from the ‘Utilities’ menu

  • Perform Repair Disk steps for the corrupted drive

  • Quit ‘Disk Utility’ once it finishes and start the computer as normal

 

Doing the above steps should resolve the issue. If these do not, you need to perform ‘Erase and Install’ and restore from the last available backup.

 

A Mac OS X user may find backup being unavailable or not in the state of restoring. In such situations, a data recovery mac utility can rescue all lost files and folders from a corrupted or reformatted disk. A Mac Data Recovery software is easy to install and operate.

 

Stellar Phoenix Macintosh Data Recovery is a useful solution designed to recover and safely restore lost or missing data from HFS, HFS+, HFSX, HFS Wrapper, and FAT file system volumes. This Data Recovery Mac tool is compatible with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, 10.5 Leopard, 10.4 Tiger, and 10.3.9 Panther.

No responses yet