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Windows File Recovery free download - Active@ File Recovery, EaseUS Deleted File Recovery, File Scavenger Data Recovery Utility, and many more programs. Go to the location where the ISO file is saved, right-click the ISO file and select Properties. On the General tab, click Change and select Windows Explorer for the program you would like to use to open ISO files and select Apply. Right-click the ISO file and select Mount. Double-click the ISO file to view the files. Microsoft has released a new data recovery app which can be used to retrieve files that have been deleted, or get back documents from drives that have been formatted or have become corrupt.
Landmark
You think those files have been deleted forever, but they can be rescued
Gone forever?
We’ve all done it – deleted files when we didn’t mean to. Whether it’s accidentally dropping them in the Recycle Bin, hitting Delete instead of Save or deleting something in DOS without thinking things through first, we’ve experienced that jaw-dropping realisation that we’ve lost work. And you may have experienced even more horror at a hard-drive crash.
However, it’s very rare that those files are completely deleted for good. Even when something really catastrophic does happen – that is, your hard drive seizes – there are professionals that can work digital miracles on your equipment to resurrect the data.
Over the next few pages we’re going to look at everything you can do to access your lost data, whether you’ve deleted it, Windows has crashed, or even when you can’t access your hard drive at all. We also point you in the direction of the companies that can help when all seems lost.
Of course, this sort of nightmare can be avoided altogether if you make regular backups.
Recovering lost data in Windows
You’ve accidentally deleted or lost a file. Here’s how you can recover it…
This can be the most annoying kind of data loss, simply because the file has usually been deleted because of user error. The important thing here, as with any kind of data recovery, is to keep calm, and think about what you’re doing. Act rashly and you make it harder to recover that file.
The first place you should look after deleting a file is the Recycle Bin. It may seem a little obvious, but this back-up facility can be overlooked. If your file is in there, right-click it and select Restore from the menu. Of course, the Recycle Bin doesn’t catch every file deletion, with files that have been deleted in DOS being a particular oversight. There are utilities that will cover this inadequacy, but if you’re in DOS, then merely knowing that a deletion could be permanent should have you in the right frame of mind.
The Restoration
An option you have at your disposal is to use an Undelete utility. To understand how these work, it helps if you have a little background knowledge of what happens when you delete a file. Windows stores file data in clusters, with the size of those clusters being determined by the type of file allocation table (FAT) you’ve set up to use. The FAT stores the links between clusters, which when connected together, make up each file. Some of the most basic file errors occur when this file becomes corrupt, and simple utilities such as ScanDisk can usually piece together the file.
Hanging Around
When it comes to file deletion, the important thing to realise is that the file isn’t actually removed from your hard drive. All that happens is that the files directory location is changed so that it points at the Recycle Bin instead. The data clusters for the file aren’t changed at all. You may think that this information is deleted when you empty the Recycle Bin, or when you bypass the Recycle Bin. But again, the actual data in the clusters is left intact, only this time the entry for the file in the FAT is updated so that those clusters are now free to be used and the first character of the file name is changed to reflect this.
A Quick Recovery
Programs that can recover these files do so by searching through the FAT for entries that have been flagged, and also by scanning the hard drive for clusters that look like they may be files. The most basic of these programs used to be part of the Microsoft OS, namely the Undelete.exe, but since the introduction of the Recycle Bin, Microsoft has stopped supplying the program. There are loads of utilities out there that will perform a similar function under more recent versions of Windows.
Recover data in DOS
How to rescue your files when you can’t even get into Windows.
You may find that you turn on your machine and it crashes - it just won’t go into Windows. If you’re lucky you’ll be able to pop into Safe mode and back up your files from there, but occasionally you won’t even be able to do that.
There’s no denying that your options for moving files around are a lot more limited in DOS. It’s very rare for external drives to come with DOS drivers, and it’s even rarer for you to have those drivers to hand – and you can’t go on the Internet to download those drivers once your machine refuses to boot. If you do have an external drive, it’s worth checking now to see if there are any DOS drivers for the device on the developer’s Web site. Iomega, for instance, has a large selection of drivers for its drives; if you have an Iomega device, then backing up should be pretty painless in DOS.
If you only have a CD-RW drive, then the chances of being able to use it in DOS crises are pretty thin – even if you find drivers, there’s not much software out there to make use of it. Most heavy duty back-up devices come with their own DOS drivers, so you should be safe there – as long as you know where the drivers are.
If you’ve partitioned your drive, or if you have more than one hard drive in your machine, then the easiest way out of this situation is to use DOS Navigator to copy files from one logical drive to another. As long as you don’t have a physical problem with your hard drive, the move will be safe from any formatting you need to do on your main drive.
The one device that everyone should have access to for backing up data is the humble floppy drive. It may not be impressive on the capacity front these days, but it’s universally supported in every operating system, including DOS.
Recovering data from a corrupt hard drive
You may be a little anxious as you turn your machine back on – it crashed, forcing you to perform a cold reboot. Maybe the power went down, maybe you kicked the power cable; whatever the reason, you could now be facing one of the most heart-stopping experiences your computer can offer: it doesn’t recognise the hard drive. One you’ve checked that the hard drives are automatically detected in the BIOS, you’re faced with the thorny problem of getting all of your data off the drive before having to re-partition it and re-install Windows.
Things may look pretty bleak, but you actually have a number of options. Your first is to use the Emergency Boot Disk. Slide this into your floppy drive and reboot; if you’re lucky you should be able to change directory to your hard drive. If you can see it this way, then it appears that your main drive’s Master Boot Record has been damaged – something that can be rectified by typing fdisk /mbr. Your data is safe as it is, although it’s a good idea to back up your data once you reload Windows.
There are a few reasons that you may have lost your MBR, and if your system didn’t crash, then there’s a chance that a virus has infected your machine. Use the boot disk that comes with your virus protection program to give your system a clean bill of health before continuing. If you have a virus, it’s worth bearing in mind that all removable media that has come into contact with your machine has probably been infected, and this includes any backups you may have made. It’s a good idea to perform several scans of your system after you’ve discovered a virus to make sure that you don’t get infected again.
Partition Magic
If you’ve been sensible enough to save your data files on to a separate partition, then don’t forget that you can access that data even if you can’t see the main drive. When you boot from the Startup disk, just check that the data partition is visible; unless you’re using some form of proprietary drive format or compression system, you don’t need to boot from your main hard drive first. It’s a good idea to make a backup of your most important data, using floppies if necessary, while you investigate the cause of the partition failure. It could be a problem that spreads later, so exercise caution.
Solving your problem is a little more complicated if you can’t see any of your partitions, although all is not lost just yet. There are tools that can be used to recover data that has become inaccessible due to a hard-drive failure. For these tools to be useful, your drive needs to be mechanically operational, so the first thing to check is that your hard drive is rotating and that the problem is down to a power-supply problem (try the drive in another machine to make sure). You can tell whether a drive is spinning up properly by carefully holding the non-electronic side of the case as the drive boots up. You should be able to pick up the subtle vibrations as the platter spins.
If you don’t think the drive is spinning up properly, or it’s significantly louder than normal, then the drive heads may have impacted with the platters. Further use could cause more damage, especially if the platter has been broken or warped. You’ll need to use a data-recovery specialist, such as Ontrack, to recover the data. This is a costly way of recovering data, and is only financially viable if the missing data would take weeks – if not months – to recreate.
Tools of the Trade
Once you’re sure the drive isn’t mechanically damaged, or the prohibitive cost of professional recovery leaves you with nothing to lose, you can start looking at low-level utilities. These tools read the hard-drive’s contents beneath the normal file-system level, thus they don’t need a working MBR or FAT for you to be able to examine the hard drive. There are a multitude of tools out there that enable you to look at your hard drive in this way, with Norton Utilities probably being the best known, and Ontrack’s EasyRecovery being one of the most professional.
How to recover Office files
There are some specific options if you’ve managed to delete an Office file. Here’s the lowdown…
So, you’ve managed to undelete your file, but now it won’t open in Word or Excel. Or perhaps your system’s crashed and ScanDisk finds some problems and fixes them, but now you can’t open the PowerPoint presentation. How do you get back the information in that file?
The problem here is that the file formats used by Office applications are extremely complex, and not too logical either. For instance, a Word document containing a single word still takes up 20k, as all those other bytes are used to store formatting, view types and even a history of modifications to the document. If you open up such a file in Notepad you’ll realise just how hard it is to piece a document together.
That’s not to say that it’s impossible, it’s just that you’ll need a little help if you want to do it in a reasonable amount of time. You may have noticed that Office applications try to recover files if your system has crashed already, but there are limits to what they can recover, which is why there are programs that have been developed specifically for this task. The OfficeRecovery suite is probably the most comprehensive of these, but it doesn’t come cheap. ExcelFix is a good alternative.
If you can’t afford any of these heavyweight utilities, then you could trim the nonsense yourself using a hex editor. The oddly named ‘XVI32’ is particularly good and can handle large file sizes. Just retrieve what you can from the corrupted file using this utility.
1. If you can open the corrupt file, then saving it using a different file format can filter out some of the junk and present you with more of your original data.
2. There are utilities that can recover more information out of these files, far beyond what Office itself can normally do.
3. Failing that, you can always try working your way through the file yourself using the XVI32 hex editor.
Using DOS Navigator
Windows won’t load, but you have a lot of files to back up? Use this great tool to make the job easier…
1. Go to www.ritlabs.com/dn to download it, then play around with it until you get used to the way it works. There’s a wealth of tools on offer here, too.
2. Next you need to find all of your documents and data files so that you can back them up in case Windows won’t load. You’ll find the majority of your files in MYDOCU~1.
3. Select the files or directory you want to copy across and then hit [F5] to bring up the copy dialog box. Select your destination as another hard drive or logical partition and hit OK.
Recover with EasyRecovery
Ontrack’s data-recovery utility can restore files when your hard drive is logically dead.
1. You need to create the necessary boot disk now, while Windows is still working. If you haven’t been able to do this before encountering a problem, you’ll have to use another machine to create the disk.
2. Boot your machine with this disk. Once your hard drive has been given a good system check you’ll be presented with the same interface used by the Windows version of the software.
3. Select the partition you want to scan and the process will begin. Once this scan has finished you’ll be presented with a list of recoverable files. Hopefully your important ones are in this list.
This material is the copyright material of or licensed to Future Publishing Limited, a Future Network plc group company, UK 2004. All rights reserved.
Jan 15, 2021 • Filed to: Recover & Repair Files • Proven solutions
Moving a document for a computer to another device can sometimes get your document corrupted. Also, not safely removing a USB drive or an External Device while editing a Word document can mess up your work. Of course, there are plenty of other causes that can create strangely. Wrong repagination, unreadable characters, or file inaccessibility is just a few things that can go wrong.
In this article, we are going to show you how to repair a corrupted Word file using a world-class Word repair tool. First, we are going to talk a little bit about it and then you will learn how to use it to recover Word documents. Happy reading!
Microsoft Recovery software, free download
Part 1: The Best Word Repair Tool for MS Office Word
1. Stellar Phoenix Word Repair
If you're looking for a professional Word repair tool that is user-friendly and can safely repair corrupted Word files, then your search stops right here. Please, allow me to present to you Stellar Phoenix Word Repair. This amazing piece of software can repair Word documents in complete safety and at the same time preserve the original text, images, fonts, header, footer, and hyperlinks of your document. It doesn't matter if your document was created in Microsoft Word 2013 or 2000, this program can fix it anyway. Recovering documents created in Word 2013 gives you the ability to recuperate embedded media objects.
- Word Repair Tool can safely repair corrupted Word files while preserving the original style and formatting of the document.
- It has a search function that helps you quickly locate your files even if you don't know their exact location.
- After you have selected and eventually scanned a document, you can preview it in three different modes.
- Word Repair is a Word document repair tool designed to fix almost all the word documents corruption errors.
- You can choose between three different recovery modes: 'Simple Repair', 'Advanced Repair' and 'Raw Recovery'. One of these recovery methods will surely help you repair corrupted Word files.
- Repairs corrupt MS Word file created in MS Word 2013, 2010, 2007, 2003, 2002, and 2000
- Supports Windows 10, 8, 7, Vista, 2003, XP, 2000, and NT
This software can recover a multitude of corruption errors. None of the original properties of a document are lost, instead of original formatting and layout are kept. The word Repair Tool can also repair Word document errors like wrong repagination, unreadable characters, or even inaccessible.
Part 2: How to Repair Damaged/Corrupt MS Word Document
In this section of the article, I am going to show you a tutorial on how to use the Word repair tool presented above. First, you need to download the software from here. After you have finally download and installed Word Repair Tool, follow us to learn how to repair Word documents:
Step 1 With Word Repair Tool main Window, select the Logical Drive where you have your files stored and click the 'Select File' button. A new window opens and hoose the corrupted document, and click 'Open';
Step 2 The next step is clicking the 'Scan' button. Wait a little bit for the process to finish;
Step 3 You can now analyze the results and switch between different view modes;
Step 4 Confirm the repaired Word file, and click the 'Save' button on the ribbon to save your document;
Video File Recovery Free Download
Tips:
- Usually, you need to use a Word repair tool when your document is inaccessible. However, if you can access your document, then you are probably able to fix problems manually. Most of the time, the header of the document seems to be the problem. Try to copy the header form a working document and paste it into the corrupted one;
- Before attempting any method to repair a Word document it is crucial to take one specific precaution measure. You should make a backup copy of the corrupt document. In case something happens, you have yourself covered and you can always have access to that copy of the document;
- Have you ever emailed your document to anyone? If you did, there is a good chance for you to find it in the 'Sent mail' folder. Use the search bar and look for the document. Maybe you won't even have to repair corrupted Word files anymore if you can find a working previous version;
- If you can open the corrupted document in Microsoft Word, try saving it to a different format like '.txt', or '.rtf'. Using a more so-called 'primitive' format could disable some document features or dependencies that could be responsible for the data corruption.
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