Data recovery utilities are useful when your computer fails before you back up your data or your hard disk fails and cannot be read by an operating system. In the former case, you can often boot into your machine using a Live CD or some other type of bootable media and simply copy the contents of your old hard drive to another disk. But if there is a disk-level failure, a more sophisticated data recovery utility is needed. When hard drives fail, it is due to either a physical symptom, such as a sector becoming corrupted or the mechanisms that read and write from the disk failing, or due to a corruption of the file system. If the master boot record, partition table, file allocation table or file system is damaged, data recovery utilities can sometimes repair these systems so the hard drive is readable. If the damage is more severe, a data recovery program can go in and salvage whatever data is still readable. This last scenario is a bit like re-entering a building that has been damaged by a fire—some of the contents may have been irrecoverably damaged, some areas may be simply inaccessible due to structural damage, while other items may be relatively untouched. The success rate of data recovery utilities depends on the scope and nature of the damage as well as the technology that drives the data recovery software.

For more information on data recovery utilities, and to find out how they can help you recover data from damaged, corrupted or failed hard drives, check out some of our links below.