Corruption and Disk Writes

[dbData]

I've read many articles in this forum where folks have written data to drives that have known corruption. There seems to be a misunderstanding in general about data corruption senerios and data recovery that I'd like to see clarified for the benefit of all concerned.

If corruption appears to exists anywhere on a drive, it should be considered unsafe to write to the drive. Particularlly if the goal is to recover data. Not only is there a distinct chance the new data will be corrupt, there is also the possibility of overwriting existing data. This includes the following operations on a corrupt drive;

1)Installing data recovery software.
2)Reinstallation of operating systems.
3)Surfing the web (writes chache files).
4)Booting the operating system. Page/swap files are, by default, dynamic. Which means they shrink (create free space) and grow (write data) based on demand.
5)Saving modifications to any file.

Ideally, when data corruption is identified, the drive should be removed from an active environment and installed as a secondary drive in a computer that already has data recovery software installed. This will reduce the potential of writing data to the corrupt drive causing further corruption.

Your thoughts and comments on this topic are welcome.




Rick

http://www.data-recovery-hub.com

 

[terrytree]

I think first thing is backup all "corrupt drive"!
And recover data from backup drive

 

[edfair]

I agree with your conclusions but would also put some emphasis on setting systems up in such a way that those things that are really valuable are put in places that are less likely to be corrupted.

Mixing the operating system, programs, and data on machines with known corruption probabilities is almost a guarantee that you will lose data one day. Accepting the installation defaults is the biggest cause.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.