Backup of hard disks not only give protect against data loss caused by hardware breakdown, lost power, extreme weather, or some other disaster. No, the backups also give protections against small mishaps. We do backup to external drives and to computer tape backup drives in order to protect the organization from loss of its data that could cripple it if it happens. But sometimes, the protections of backups are not for businesses but for home users. These are private computer users who have not done regular backups and collected tons of family photos the loss of which would be irrecoverable.

Let’s say you are a PC expert with a mobile PC service business and you get a call from one of these home users where it says that Windows is corrupt and will refuse to start up. And as in most cases there will be no backup but you ask anyways. To make it even more alarming, the home user, since he had a DOS prompt, tried a utility named FDISK thinking it meant “Fix disk” and by error deleted the disk partition. This is where you are in need of a software to recover data deleted partitions.

Disk partitions should be worked on to those who are experts on them and how unforgiving it can be if the utilities for them are used wrong. The best thing is to have a partition utility product such as Norton Ghost that will make a partition backup of the vital setups and system software and then a different utility such as Novastor Backup to do incremental and complete backups of user data files. But sometimes, a simple partition recovery tool can put a disk partition to work after restoration with little data loss.

Because the hard disk won’t to start up, that in itself doesn’t always mean that the system disk can’t be made to work. It some cases it could be that just a limited area on the hard disk contains bad blocks and that this location is preventing the OS from booting up because several booting errors are reported by the system. If a partition is removed by accident, then the data in that partition still remains. Just the partition table has to be modified.

EASEUS Partition Manager is one software which can restore deleted partitions. Another product is File Scavenger. File Scavenger also claims that it can recover from formatting a partition. Still there exists other software tools for this, but the goal here is to recreate condition from which you can move the information files to another partition or backup and then create a newly created boot partition. Next after using a partition recovery software tool, the hope is that Windows can be booted up. If the case is that it doesn’t work as planned, you like to be able to get a DOS prompt to show up so that you can identify the files that then are need to be removed to another location.

If you have the fortune to be able to see the DOS prompt command and see the files that is stored in the user’s “My Documents” folder, then you should be able to hook up to an external backup drive (the simplest solution is to use a USB external hard drive) and to start moving the files off to this drive. Then, the disk can be reformatted, Windows installed, and the files recovered. It’s a cumbersome restoration but your client will be very happy to get the family pictures back.