So after the Windows Vista debacle I was less then ready to jump on the Windows 7 bandwagon. For obvious reasons I wanted to take a wait and see attitude about the OS since with Windows Vista doing logical (software) data recovery was a huge chore that I generally could not gain access to the hard disk properly to do so.
After reading and waiting I finally made the leap and installed Windows 7 Enterprise edition on to my home machine. I was extremely happy with it at first, it seemed to be running all my applications. Some of the low level data recovery stuff I use still required the right click run as administrator deal but they were working. I was able to see the drives and work my magic with them. I am a huge advocate for the operating system now in the past 8 months I have run in to no software that does not work, and if anything the multitask ability of they OS seems to be TRUE multitask.
With all that being said there is a few things I have run into when it comes to pure data recovery with Windows 7 that are issues. First, with Windows XP you could force it see a bad hard disk just by putting the drive in a USB chassis and waiting for Windows to boot before connecting it. I have noticed that is the drive has the normal scattered bad sectors across the front of the drive Windows 7 will not pick that drive up, and if you have the drive physically slaved into the machine and the BIOS is seeing it, in some instances Windows 7 will still ignore the drive like it is not connected at all.
The other really irritating problem is that lets say it is a boot drive, with Windows XP if you slaved the drive in you would have full access to the Documents and Settings directories as long as you took control of those folders. With Windows 7, taking control of those folders is not a simple task, and it does not seem to work like it should either. A lot of times it says you have ownership and yet still denies access to the data, which makes moving the data off frustrating.
Most of the time to keep from being annoyed by the permission problems I run Recover It All and just use it to copy the data off since it ignores permissions I don’t end up with all the errors while copying.
While there are challenges to using Windows 7 for data recovery, it can be done. I should also note that we can easily recover data from damaged Windows 7 hard drives. Call 727-345-9665 if you need data recovery!