Naturally, accidental and intentional deletion of files destroys information previously recorded on hard drives that can be restored using special utilities. But you can also find cases of fast or full formatting of hard drives, when data is believed to be permanently deleted, not to mention damage to the hard drives themselves. What to do in this case? Here programs for hard drive recovery come to the rescue. Most of the simplest utilities can be downloaded for free. However, even they help, as they say, bring the disk to life. Consider the most popular software products, including both free and paid utilities.
How is the process of deleting files from the hard drive?
Before considering the main topic, we make a small digression into the theoretical part and see how information is deleted. In Windows-based systems, there are two ways: removal to the "Recycle Bin" and without it. In the first case, the files are simply moved to the area reserved on the hard drive, so restoring them from the "Recycle Bin" is easy.
In the second case, the file is renamed, in which the first character in the name changes to unreadable ($). If during the work in the clusters where such a file is located, the overwrite was not performed, information can also be restored.
The situation is worse with the fast or full formatting of disks and partitions, as well as with situations when the hard drive starts to “crumble” or simply undergo physical damage. Many users mistakenly believe that it is impossible to restore files in this case, they say, only professional experts can do it. Nothing like this! If you use, for example, the same programs for recovering Seagate Barracuda hard drives, with which at one time there were many problems, such a process can be carried out by any, even untrained user. And it’s completely elementary.
Programs for recovering hard drives after formatting: can this be done?
In the case of fast formatting of the hard drive, the partition tables are overwritten, and with full formatting, the disk surface is also checked with the subsequent correction of bad sectors. At the same time, we are not talking about factory low-level formatting at all.
This is precisely what allows many developers to create programs for recovering hard drives that, as it were, produce the reverse process. This gives the same recovery effect. But first things first.
The best hard drive recovery programs
As for the most famous utilities to date, a sample list may look like this:
- Victoria HDD;
- R.Saver and R-Studio;
- HDD Regenerator;
- Acronis Recovery Expert and Active Partition Recovery Pro;
- Hetman Partition Recovery;
- Zero Assumption Recovery.
Naturally, a complete list is impossible, since today there are hundreds of such software products. But let us dwell on the above utilities in more detail.
Victoria HDD
If we consider the most popular programs for recovering hard disks and disk partitions, of course, the leadership belongs to one of the most powerful utilities of our time called Victoria HDD, the developer of which is Sergey Kazansky.
The program has five levels of hard drive testing, it is able to identify and display bad areas, eliminate errors, plot surface conditions, measure performance, etc. Operating modes also look interesting. The application can be run in a regular graphical shell, or you can use a somewhat unusual DOS mode. By the way, it is with such a check that the most powerful effect is achieved.
R.Saver and R-Studio
These two programs for recovering hard drives from a flash drive work just fine and are very similar to each other. They can even be used as portable versions.
The main advantage of these utilities is that they support almost all file systems known today and are capable of recovering data on any type of media, including even formatted or damaged memory cards.
HDD Regenerator
This utility among all programs is relatively new. It is designed specifically to restore bad sectors and, as the developers themselves say, even to reanimate the surface of the hard drive.
It uses the latest technology of the so-called magnetization reversal, which allows you to completely restore the hard drive and the information that was recorded on it earlier. It works, however, only in the DOS mode, which many cause some bewilderment. In addition, the technology itself seems almost unrealistic, because some do not imagine how it is possible to remagnetize a surface in a software way. Nevertheless, everyone who came across it expresses admiration only - the application is able to reanimate even completely "dead" disks.
Acronis Recovery Expert and Active Partition Recovery Pro
Before us are two representatives of the family of utilities for HDD recovery. The peculiarity of these applications is that they support a large number of file systems and hard drives.
In addition, they provide a mode for creating bootable media, with which you can fix many problems if starting the operating system from a problematic hard drive is impossible.
True, the first utility is paid, the second - no. But the second application is also interesting in that it can be run both from under DOS and from under Windows.
Hetman partition recovery
Another utility for recovering disks, USB drives or memory cards and the information stored on them is interesting in that it can work with all types of virtual partitions. It goes without saying that data can be restored even after full formatting.
But the most important thing is that the program can work both in manual mode and in the “Wizard” mode, which allows any user to apply automation of the entire recovery process.
Zero Assumption Recovery
Finally, another small and fairly simple application, abbreviated as ZAR. This program is mainly intended for recovering FAT and NTFS file systems, although it can also be used for Linux. For users of Windows-systems, it is perfect.
But here it is worth considering that in this case we are talking exclusively about information recovery (even from bad sectors). In this case, the program on the hard disk itself does not make any corrections after analysis.
Conclusion
Of course, only the most basic programs for recovering hard drives were considered here . When choosing a program, you should be guided by the situation itself, that is, choose which operation should be applied (information recovery or troubleshooting on the hard drive itself), and only then decide on the use of a particular utility.