A handful of recovery techniques that actually do work should be implemented when your computer is acting strange. Try to avoid the ones that are shown not to work. There are plenty of recovery techniques and software out there. However, only a handful of them actually work in every situation and on every type of machine.
The first major disaster is when a hard drive develops a bad block. Many inexperienced computer users run around like a chicken with their head off believing they have a virus when in actuality their hard drive is going bad. The telltale signs can be problems when booting up or shutting down. Sometimes there will be displayed problems or the computer may be responding slowly. While these can be signs of a virus, they are more likely signs that the hard drive is about to fail.
There are a few programs written in assembly language that can inspect the hard drive and make an attempt at repair. This is the only recovery technique that will actually work in all situations and on every computer. Other recovery software is available but they are not written in assembly language. Therefore, they are not guaranteed work to in all cases. The best assembly language program for recovering a HD is aptly named “SpinRite” over Gibson’s research.
Now, the second recovery technique that will actually work when your computer is acting strange is called “Mirroring”. This is synonymous to a full backup but with far less problems. After purchasing a new hard drive there is no guarantee the backed up allocation tables will match the new drive. If you do not know how to change them or if your software cannot do it, the backup is useless. This can be solved by making a mirror copy of your old hard drive and copying it onto the new. The best software to use for this is from Norton and it is called “Ghost”.
