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A data drive is a non-boot, non-system drive that only contains user programs and data. The procedure is straightforward and requires five steps as follows:
Step 1: Protect the source drive.
To stop data from being written to a data drive, please do the following:
Stop using the computer for any activities other than data recovery.
Stop all background programs that may write to the data drive. For example if the drive holds an SQL database, stop SQL.
Do not download or install any software on the data drive.
Disable all shared folders on the data drive.
Step 2: Install File Scavenger®
Step 3: Purchase a license.
You can purchase a license at this time. For a Professional-Use license, purchase and download a license file onto the computer. For a Personal-Use license, run File Scavenger® and click Help, Licenses, Personal-Use license to display the Registration Code. This code is required to purchase a matching license key to activate the program.
You can also use File Scavenger in demo mode to determine if data can be recovered. In demo mode you can save recovered files up to 64 kilobytes. You can also display a picture file (files with the extensions BMP, JPG, TIF, PNG, etc.) of any size in preview mode by right-clicking on in and click Preview.
Step 4: Scan and Save.
Select a drive to scan. Select a disk number (such as Disk 1) if there is no drive letter or if the drive has been deleted, resized, unsuccessfully merged or otherwise lost.
A Quick Scan usually works well for searching a deleted or mildly corrupt drive, recovering accidentally deleted files or and for reconstructing a broken RAID or spanned volume. Use a Long Scan to recover a reformatted drive, a badly corrupted volume or when a Quick Scan is not effective. A Quick Scan takes a few minutes to complete compared to a Long Scan which may take several minutes to a few hours.
Recovered data must be saved to a drive other than the one holding the lost data. If the computer has insufficient free disk space, use a shared network folder on another computer, memory stick or external USB drive. You can also save a few gigabytes of data to the boot drive at a time and transfer it to a CD or DVD.
Step 5: Validate results.
Open recovered files in their respective programs for validation. Do not dispose of or reformat the source disk before all data has been recovered and validated.
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