Computers Today, November 1-15, 2000; Hands On; The Crash Insurance

Do not worry even if a virus has wiped off critical data from your hard disk drive

"General failure reading drive X", "Hard disk fails", "Hard disk not accessible"-in an era of viruses galore, confronting such messages aren't uncommon. The entire precious data and projects you have been working on, go down the drain. Rescue might be at hand with the Stellar data recovery software. If it's a hardware fault, then chances of data recovery are slim. But if it's an operating system fault or virus attack, it won't be too difficult to recover your data with Stellar Shield.

Runs on: PC with 2 MB free hard disk space, floppy drive, 8 MB RAM & VGA display. Runs on MS-DOS, Windows 3.X, Windows9x, Windows NT (FAT file system)
From: Stellar Information Systems Pvt. Ltd, 205 Skipper Corner, 88 Nehru Place, New Delhi
Phone: 641 8809, 641 8810. Fax: 641 1810
E-mail: recovery@nde.vsnl.net.in.
Web site: www.stellarinfo.com/
Price: Rs 3,990

There are many subtle features that make Stellar a lifesaver tool. It recovers data from disks with corrupted/damaged partition table, boot sector, FAT (file allocation table) and directory area. Stellar is Windows 98 compatible, that is, it can take care of FAT 32 file system and long filenames. It maintains a query-based search operation to quickly access any part of the disk. For instance, StelRep will help you in recovering data in events like accidental format, inaccessible disk due to power failure, Chernobyl (WIN-CIH) or other virus attacks, and cases like re-formatted hard drives, missing directories, deleted files/directories and bad file allocation table. It consists of three utilities-Stelday, Stelrep and Stelform.

Once installed, Stellar runs every time when the system is booted. It is the Stelday utility that makes an image of critical file information of the hard drive and stores this image as a file. This file system information is necessary for your operating system (OS) to access, read and write files and to rebuild your hard disk drive in the event of a disk crash. A copy of this file should be kept separately and periodically in a removable disk drive.

The data recovery is done by Sterlip utility. Whenever your disk crashes or you accidentally format your hard disk, reboot the system using a bootable floppy and run Sterlip.

As soon as the Stelday files are made available, Sterlip will restore the necessary critical information on your hard disk.

If you don't have a backup image and want to recover data manually then depending on the nature and amount of damage, Stellar takes you to the appropriate mode of recovery-automatic, heuristic or manual. If the directory area of the hard drive is totally or partially correct, Stellar takes you to the automatic mode of recovery. This shows the drive's directory structure and file and directory attributes-name, length, cluster, date, time and type. You can simply select the files you want to restore. The heuristic mode is activated if the directory or FAT copies are lost, for example, if a disk is accidentally formatted and all directory entries and FAT links are lost. In this mode, Stellar scans for all possibly recoverable files and directories in each sector of the drive and shows these as a list.

The manual recovery mode is the most powerful among all where you can select and restore any of the files or directories in each sector. However, depending upon the amount of data, it can take a long time for recovery.

Stellar is easy to use and has a menu-driven interface. However, remember that Stellar can recover data only in cases where the system can detect the hard disk drive. In case the data in hard disk is encrypted, data recovery would be limited. Also, a limited data recovery is possible from disks with bad sectors.