Important Items

As you use the Data Recovery Wizard and read this user manual, you will come across terms with which you may not be familiar. So we've compiled the following list of definitions as follows:

Dynamic Disk

A Dynamic disk is a physical disk that provides features the basic disks do not have, such as support for volumes spanning multiple disks. Dynamic disks use a hidden database to track information about dynamic volumes on the disk and other dynamic disks in the computer. Dynamic disk management is a data/Hard Disk management method on Microsoft Windows platforms, first introduced with Windows 2000 Operating System. The basic concept was put to use on UNIX platforms years earlier. There are five types of Dynamic volumes: Simple Volume, Striped Volume, Spanned Volume, Mirrored Volume, and RAID-5 Volume.

HDD

It is the short form of "Hard Disk Drive", a HDD helps to manage the transfer of data to and from your computer's Hard Disk. Because these two items always come as a single unit and "Hard Disk" are usually used to refer to the same thing.

Bad Device

This is the storage device that contains the data you want to recover. A Bad Device can be any disk-like storage media, such as your computer's Hard Disk, an external HDD, Flash card or any other form of removable media.

Good Device

This is a storage device that is in perfect working order onto which you want the Data Recovery Wizard to save the data recovered from the Bad Device. The Good Device may be located on the computer where you've installed the Data Recovery Wizard (the "host" computer). The Good Device can be any of the storage media listed for the Bad Device. The Good Device is used to save recovered data from the Bad Device.

Host Computer

This is the computer on which you have installed The Data Recovery Wizard. The Host Computer is used to recover the lost data from the Bad Device, which should be connected to the Host Computer as an additional drive (second, third or fourth - in addition to the existing drive(s) on the Host Computer). This means that the Host Computer will have at least two disks: Bootable HDD from which is used to boot Windows; The Bad Device is set as an additional drive.

If you are using removable media such as a Zip disk or a Flash card, you should insert the device before launching the Data Recovery Wizard.

FAT

It is the short form of "File Allocation Table", a FAT is a table stored on your storage device that tells the computer where to look over when it needs to find a file stored on this device. When you save data, it is stored in chunks of information called "clusters". The clusters for a single file may actually be located in several different areas on your storage media. The FAT is the way for your computer to record the locations of those clusters for each file you save. The term FAT is often used to refer to the file systems which use File Allocation Tables - FAT12, FAT16, and FAT32.

NTFS

It is the short form of "New Technology File System", this is basically the Windows NT equivalent of the FAT described above.

EXT2/EXT3

It is the short form of "The Second/Third Extended File System", and it is used in Linux/UNIX Operating System. It carries out the semantic file and supports the advance extended characteristics in Linux/UNIX Operating System.

Partition

A partition is a logical division of a Hard Disk that creates the impression that you have more than one Hard Disk. If you want to run two different Operating Systems on the same Hard Disk, you should create a two-partition drive when you format the disk. Partitioning a disk is just a way to divide it into independent sections.