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PC maintenance articles for October 1999:
NO, this is not my PC. Mine is better :) - true! Check some pictures
of my real thing, day 30 August
1999.
The picture above is not very related to the text on your right... but
it will be a future October subject - "silent PCs".
October will publish material on "HD data recovering",
the conclusion of September's "the truth about patches" feature,
and a debate on "silent PCs".
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About MBR, file systems, partitions
and file recovering, part 1
I am back! What a week! The last few days were a true nightmare; a fight
against the FAT. I spent dozens of hours, tweaking FAT and FAT32 file
system records, in order to recover some ~30 GB of data, corresponding
to my precious works. It was because of such horrors, that this website
was one week without being updated. But I've learned from the mistake,
and may be you can learn something too...
I have the healthy habit of backing up my stuff, every month. I have
many CDROMs, corresponding to many backups, but as my September 1999
updates will tell you, the HD crash occurred in the very last days of
the month, meaning that ALL the month's files were still to be saved
on optical disk. So, all the September 1999 stuff almost flew to BYTE's
heaven... almost... [and some files did...]
Fortunately there are some great recovery tools available on the Internet.
You can recover most of your files, even after FORMATING your HD! Isn't
that incredible? Yes, it sure is and it rises two issues:
#1 - if an high-level format doesn't really erase data, how come I had
problems recovering my files?
#2 - if an high-level format doesn't really erase data, shouldn't people
be worried about the security of their private files?
My dramatic comment to the first issue, is that there is a very special
location on your HD, that if it does get damaged, it compromises the
whole of the remaining areas - it was that precise location that had
problems. Such location is NOT the MBR [Master Boot Record], as most
of you might be thinking, but the FATs duplicate area, where duplicates
of the FATs [File Allocation Tables] are stored.
If the MBR gets damaged, you can easily recover it, by installing any
partition manager, or even some Operating Systems [OS], as long as you
don't format the volumes to the OS's particular file system. Recovering
the MBR corresponds to installing a special software to the very first
sector of your HD - that software is called whenever the HD is the booting
device, as selected by the BIOS.
For example, when you do a "from the ground" install of Windows
95, 98 or NT, the OS will install its boot manager. Linux does the same,
but its default boot manager - LILO - is smart & kind enough to ask
the user in which partition to install itself. In Windows, there is no
choice: the boot manager will always be installed on the first partition
of your current IDE0 device, and that occurs without you even knowing
it is happening :). Plus, the NTFS, FAT and FAT32 file systems
do NOT allow more than one active partition per device... and no more
than one primary partition per device (as in Linux)... but you don't
really need to respect these restrictions... as their are simple flags
that are set / not set... FDISK and LILO or Disk Druid don't allow you
to tweak such data, but there is another tool that gives you complete
freedom... and I am using it!
The tool I am talking about is Ranish's
Partition Manager [RPM @ http://www.users.intercom.com/~ranish/part/ ].
Although I am not doing anything radical with it, the truth is that
installing it as the boot manager is a GREAT option - you can install
many OSs on the same HD and do everything as you want. For the first
time ever, I feel that Linux and Win98 are living happily together
in my [recovered] PC!
RPM is just the first tool I wanted to talk you about. But it is a MBR
related tool, not the thing to solve the TRUE nightmare of what to do,
when the FATs get damaged...
Tomorrow I will write about the 2nd issue about high-level formats,
and introduce you the wonderful tools that allowed me to recover my most
precious, not backed up, files. One of these tools costs thousands of
dollars, but may be I can tell you a way to use it for free :) oopspss... :)
Check this website soon, for the second and final part on this subject.
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