Symantec NORTON SYSTEMWORKS 2004 RETAIL (10109303) for PC

316 Disk Editor

Lift data from a damaged hard disk

Data recovery procedures

To lift data from a corrupt or physically damaged hard disk, use the following procedures.

Action

Identify the disk type.

For more information

See “Determine whether Disk Editor is accessing your disk as a logical or physical disk” on page 316.

If the disk is being accessed as a logical disk, extract data.

See “Extract data from a logical disk” on page 317.

If the disk is being accessed as a physical disk, extract clusters.

See “Extract clusters from a physical disk” on page 318.

Find more lost clusters.

See “Find the rest of the clusters” on page 322.

Once you fix the problem, make sure that a virus is not causing it.

Determine whether Disk Editor is accessing your disk as a logical or physical disk

Disk Editor estimates the correct values of your disk’s physical and logical parameters. The number of sides, cylinders, sectors, and so on are inserted into the appropriate fields of the Advanced Recovery Mode dialog box automatically and used to treat the disk as a logical disk.

If the disk’s parameters are incorrect, the resulting logical disk may have structural problems. If you consistently run into problems accessing the disk, reenter the disk’s physical and logical parameters in the

Advanced Recovery Mode dialog box. For example, if you select the first copy of the FAT but do not see it, the number of total sectors may be incorrect.