You may have heard of the process of setting up a malfunctioned hard disk drive as a slave drive. This refers to attaching by cable a hard drive from a computer that’s operating system has failed. The purpose of this is to allow the working operating system to access all stored files on the slave drive so that they may be copied to a second location. This is a simple enough process but when that hard drive contains deleted files or corrupted files that the working operating system cannot recognize you will also need to download to the technician computer a third party data recovery program. These are programs built specifically for recovering lost data from internal computer hard drives.

When files are lost, damaged or deleted from external drives the same powerful data recovery tools can be downloaded directly onto your PC and your PC’s operating system can then direct the program to scan the attached digital media. This allows you to easily recover lost data from flash drive media and even larger digital storage devices such as external book drives.

Files on a computer partition can be damaged or lost through several ways. As usual improper startup or shutdown of your computer is always the greatest cause of file damage and loss. Another very common cause of loss of partition information is accidental reformatting. In truth Windows will often prompt you to reformat a partition or digital storage device that is connected to your computer. This prompt occurs simply because Windows did not properly recognize that device.

Yet if you follow the prompt’s advice you will effectively delete all of the files stored on your partition or other digital media. This results in the need to recover formatted partition data. When attempting to recover lost partitions Windows users must remember that the program they choose should support the partition file system used on their PC. These can be divided into the FAT and NTFS systems. Most Windows based PCs built within the last seven or eight years use the NTFS system.

To recover deleted files Windows XP computer owners as well as users that have Vista as their OS need to be aware that many data recovery programs are not compatible with their PCs. To begin with Mac OS X applications for data recovery are completely invalid for file recovery on a Windows based PC. Furthermore, earlier versions of Windows such as Windows 98 use a different file system than that which is used on XP, Vista and Windows 7.

Don’t be fooled by file recovery programs that claim to be universal in a sort of one size fits all manner. The directory structure of hard drives used on Windows and Macs is so different as to make this an impossibility. Also remember that many data recovery programs have narrow applications. A photo recovery program will probably not allow you to recover deleted document files. Very often one can find a quality general purpose file recovery program that can work in any Windows application and recover the majority of lost file types.