Thursday, November 5, 2009

Cloning and Data Loss Situations in Windows Hard Drive

The computer hard drives store data and programs together and thus there is a need to switch over a faster and larger capacity drive. Now you need to reinstall the operating system and all the programs on the new drive. This may also lead to a severe data loss situation and require Windows Data Recovery. To tackle such situations, you can create a mirror copy of your hard drive that could easily restore all of your documents, files, data, programs and even operating system. This method is known as Disk Cloning.

The Disk Cloning is process of replicating all the contents of one hard drive to another computer hard drive or image file. Generally, the contents of first hard drive are written to image file as intermediate step, and second disk is loaded with contents of image. The process is very helpful specifically when moving to large hard drives. The cloning is made easy through Disk Cloning software.

The hard drive cloning tool is used for :

  • Hard disk upgrade: You can use such applications to upgrade to new or larger capacity hard drive. It prevents data loss and need of Windows Data Recovery Software.

  • Provisioning new systems: Provisioning with the standard set of software so that you can go away with complete application suite and doesn't need to waste time in installing individual programs.

  • Complete system backup: Using hard drive cloning applications, you can create a comprehensive and full backup of your operating system, data and all the installed application software.

  • System recovery: Using the disk clone software you can create rescue disk that is used to restore your computer to its original settings after operating system malfunction. This is basically used for operating system recovery.

The disk cloning software have to be able to access even the protected operating system resources on source drive. The system must be in a consistent and working state while the software read the drive and create clone image of it. If you have any operating system or applications installed on the destination disk while cloning, the software will overwrite everything and create a fresh copy of all the data.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is the most effective and advanced tool to easily clone your hard drive. It works well with Microsoft Windows 7, Vista, 2003, XP and 2000. It creates clone of all FAT32, VFAT, NTFS and NTFS5 file system partitions of your Windows hard drive.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Lets rectify error : “DISK READ ERROR OCCURED”

It happens some times that at the time of up gradation the hard drive is automatically formatted with FAT (File Allocation Table) file system and all the data stored on the hard drive gets lost.

This situation is general in dual-boot system. This behavior of Microsoft Windows makes all your data inaccessible and can cause serious data loss. Now you are required to scan the affected hard drive and opt for an effective Windows Data Recovery to retrieve lost data from Windows hard drive.

In a practical situation, if you've NT-based version of Microsoft Windows installed on first primary partition that is formatted as NTFS (New Technology File System), and you select to format the partition as NTFS file system during setup to begin with clean partition, Windows setup process will format the drive as FAT, copy files from CD and try to reboot system in GUI mode to continue installation. In such situations, your system would stop responding and you come across below error message:

DISK READ ERROR occurred.”

If you run ChkDsk on affected Windows drive, you will encounter following error message:

The media descriptor byte is invalid.
FAT copies are not the same.
Many cross linked files.
All directory entries were invalid.”

Try to repair partition doesn't sort out the problem and the installation could not be continued. In these cases, you need to find out the cause of this problem and carry out Windows Recovery by fixing it.

Root of the problem

Earlier Windows NT kernel format the partition using FAT file system and then convert the file system to NTFS on final re-boot after installation. If you reformat the boot partition using NTFS file system, setup writes 16 sector boot area on freshly formatted FAT drive after file copy operation completes.

In order to sort out such issue, Windows Data Recovery is required. This is best possible using advanced third-party applications, known as Windows Data Recovery Software. The tools work in the majority of data loss situations and allow you to perform quick and easy recovery. The have non-destructive conduct and thus do not alter original data on drive and always perform safe recovery.