In the case of partition loss due to accidental deletion, and MBR damage one must use the Recover it software to recover the data to a different storage location rather than trying to repair the partition in the place.
Partition- An Overview
Physical disks are divided into volumes that are termed as various logical disks which we can easily see as the separate drives in our computer.
The information about the number of volumes in your system and their location is stored in on the Master Boot Record (MBR) and also sometimes on Extended Partition Pointers (EPP). The space occupied by the MBR and EPPs is 512 bytes for each. The codes that are responsible for the booting process are present in the MBR that is located in sector 0 of the physical disk. Also, the four entries describing the partition are contained in the MBR. The entries may point to the volume directly, or may point to the EPP block or else it can be even unused.
Every EPP block has the pointer to the volume and also has an additional pointer to the net EPP block in the chain. By this way, you can create more than four volumes form your physical disk. Primary Partition is the partition that is defined in the MBR, whereas the partition defined in the EPPs are called Logical Drive.
Limitations
The MBR can contain at the most four records in total including the pointer to EPR and primary partitions. Theoretically, EPR can also contain 4 entries but when taken into practice these can never be used. Moreover, the logical drives cannot be made active in the extended partition.
Need for Partition Recovery
The reason for the corruption of partition table can be many, some of them that require the use of partition recovery free software are listed below:
- You may find that there are times when the volumes disappear automatically and the disk drive either shows the space as unallocated or something weird at the place where you would have expected the partition.
- It might also be the case when the system will refuse for the booting process showing messages like Error Loading Operating System or Bad or missing partition table and sometimes no messages at all.
- Or Phantom volumes might appear in the Disk Manager which you have never created. In that case, the total storage capacity which is calculated by adding the total volumes and the sizes of the free space area can also exceed the capacity of the Physical Disk. This calls for a dangerous situation which indicates the overlapping of the volumes and can cause writing on one of the volumes leading to damaging of the other.
Understanding of Partition Recovery
The basic step that is required for the recovery of the partition is the knowledge about the location and sizes of the missing volumes. Considering the situation in which the disk was partitioned as a single logical drive, it can be efficiently assumed that the entire physical drive is occupied by the volume and the rest of the things are done by the file system recovery algorithm.
The distortion process is not applicable and used for the slack space that is available before and after the volume because of its small size. With the involvement of multiple volumes, the partition recovery becomes even more difficult, it is because of the damage of MBR that can lead to the disappearing of multiple volumes at once. The major challenge in such cases is the definition of the volumes.
Use the following features of the disk layout to solve the situations:
It might be the case that the boot sector and their copies if available are still intact to the disk. If this is the situation than ZAR can easily search from the hints. But whatever might be the case, it is required to manually attribute the found objects to their corresponding volumes.
Other cases can be that the volumes are placed very close to each other. For the partition recovery, in most of the cases, it is required to disregard the unused space and treat the entire allocation as adjacent. It provides the last-resort Information, this can help in finding the information by simply checking the sum total of the sizes of the volumes.
False Positives While Scanning for Partition
The backup of the boot sector is saved at the volume by the Modern File Systems. Specifically mentioning the FAT32 it places the backup at the sixth sector of the volume. For NTFS, the backup is taken and stored in the last sector, whereas, FAT16 does not have a sector assigned for backup. ZAR may try to shortlist these sectors but this filtration might not be perfect and lead to the appearance of Phantom volumes. It is to be noted that the difference in the location of the primary data and the backup copy in the case of FAT32 is very minor which could be easily accommodated during the recovery.
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