I am a pretty visual guy and because of that my problem solving skills are based on viewing.  When trying to recover data from a corrupt file system I like to use a hex editor and view the system areas of the drive to make sure that everything is intact.  There have been many times when I have trusted a tool to diagnose a problem, but because of some subtlety in the file system corruption the software led me in the wrong direction.  I believe many people are the same way. They like to see what the situation is at its lowest level and decide how best to solve the problem.

In the business of data recovery viewing, seeing, looking, putting an eye on, or however you want to describe it is the single most valuable tool for a technician.  There is nothing more powerful than a technician with a hex editor and a calculator trying to piece together a file system.  As John Keats said, “A thing of beauty, is a Joy forever!”.  In line with this philosophy DTI Data will offer a set of free tools to help the technician view a file system, a hard drive, or a single file in order to help them and their client solve a problem.  This set of tools will be called View It Now with the proper specific tag related to the software.  For instance, the first tool will be View It Now SNAP Appliance 4.x. This tool will allow the technician to tree a SNAP 4.x file system.  Each tool will have a set functions that are unique to the file system, for instance the SNAP 4.x viewer will allow the end user to check the cylinder group alignment to make sure that the file system is not corrupted. We have also finished the NTFS version of View It Now! Download it here.

In addition to the reading and treeing the file system there will be tools such as surface scanners, block maps, raw file scanner, forensic tools, and many others.  We are hoping to give the technician a leg up on recovering a clients data so that their possibility of success is higher, and the chance of making an already bad situation worse far less likely.

The documentation for these tools will be published  in these blogs so you can refer to them at any time.  There will be a general set of documentation that will work for all tools.  Items such as configuring a river, mounting a file as a stream, scanning for a volume and many others.  There will also be functions that are specific to the tool and will be highlighted as such.  It is our hope that with the documentation as well as an open forum to make suggestions or ask questions the usefulness of the tool will increase as we update the software to reflect your input.

Hopefully these tools will be an asset to any technicians arsenal of software.  DTI Data looks forward to serving you.

If your disk is clicking or not seen by the BIOS, you will need hard drive recovery.

Tags: File Systems Explained View It Now