As a result, an I/O operation that otherwise involves 4K of data now spans two sectors leading to a read-modify-write operation that reduces performance and any chance of recovery. Since C-H-S addressing originally supported a maximum of 63 sectors per cylinder, the first partition would begin on sector 63.īecause LBA 63 is not a multiple of 8 (eight 512-byte legacy sectors fit into a 4K sector), an Advanced Format disk which is formatted in the old manner will have clusters (the smallest unit of file system data allocation, typically 4K in size) that are not aligned to the physical sectors on a 4K disk, a condition called Alignment 1. Even after logical block addressing was introduced, fake C-H-S values (which did not correspond to the actual disk geometry) were used to maintain compatibility with the legacy API. On legacy systems and boot loaders that used the INT 13h API, all partitions must begin and end on cylinder boundaries. This is an artifact of cylinder-head-sector (C-H-S) addressing used in INT 13h, the legacy BIOS API used for disk access.
Newer versions of Windows will create partitions on a 1 MB boundary, ensuring proper alignment to the physical sectors.
The recovery can be on the logical or physical sector on the HD, I can not find anywhere what this software uses to recover the sectors, therefore, it is difficult to comment on the usefulness of this software.Īssume #1, uses logical sectors of 4Kb to recover data, not very reliable, if one logical sector is missing or is corrupted, no useful recovery is possible.Īssume#2, uses physical sectors of 4Kb, the recovery could take days on very big hard drive and if the physical damage is permanent only partial file can be recovered. Ransomware can seek out backup files, but if they're on an unattached drive it cannot find them. It's also not a bad idea to get everything set up as above & use it for regular backups because ransomware - you just don't need to do sector by sector backups normally, but only if/when you want to include non-indexed data. For backup storage I suggest a drive dock paired with a small fan for hard drive cooling - without active cooling the drive &/or your data can be compromised. FWIW I recommend Macrium Reflect, as it seems to create the best bootable USB sticks, or an external hard drive running Windows To Go, but you should still test either on your device(s). Do Not take it for granted that whatever should work because it says so on the label. 1) you need to make sure your device will boot to the USB stick or drive, ideally beforehand, & 2) you need to make sure you have a reliable external drive to store the backup data. That last has the advantage of not tying up your PC/laptop so you can get back to work.
using a backup software bootable USB stick, then make a complete, sector by sector backup of the drive/partition - afterward you restore that backup somewhere else, & run recovery software on it. Īnd another way is to boot to another OS, e.g. Another way is to run Windows from an external drive, e.g. One way to accomplish recovery then is to plug the drive into another PC/laptop. Once a file is no longer indexed, there's nothing to prevent overwriting one or more of the chunks of data that make up that file, thus it is often recommended to stop writing to the drive/partition where the file was stored.
Recovery apps like iBeesoft Data Recovery find existing chunks of data & try to put them together as separate files. Data's stored in small chunks - working like a TOC or index, file tables list which chunks in which order make up complete files - with a regular drive those small chunks of data are not overwritten when a file's deleted, but rather it's TOC or index listing is removed - SSDs on the other hand run Trim operations to actually delete unused chunks of data.