Data Recovery Made Easy in Windows

Did you delete an important document accidently? Lost all your data after a system failure? Crashed hard disk prevents you from doing your work? Corrupted or reformatted memory card no longer has digital pictures from the last photo session? Don't worry! You can recover your files and data easily and automatically with http://www.softambulance.com.

This innovative data recovery tool makes file and data recovery easy to anyone. No matter whether you've lost Word documents, a set of digital pictures or compressed archives, SoftAmbulance Uneraser can recover files of any type and from any media, including hard drives, USB disks, flash memory cards and sticks, and pretty much anything else if it was formatted with FAT or NTFS. If it's not a CD or DVD, SoftAmbulance Uneraser will recover your files from there!

SoftAmbulance Uneraser is simple, reliable and bullet-proof. Even if you tried to do it yourself with free data recovery tools such as checkdisk and they messed up the disk, SoftAmbulance Uneraser can still recover your files from there by applying sophisticated scientific algorithms.

Unlike certain disk recovery tools, SoftAmbulance Uneraser finds your files and recovers your data instead of repairing the file system and other structures of the disk. The innovative Deep Scan technology is designed to recover files from media that's been severely damaged or attempted fixing with other disk recovery tools. Deep Search technology scans the entire surface of a hard drive in order to locate every recoverable file with or without a file system present. Even if the disk has been corrupted, repartitioned and formatted consequently, SoftAmbulance Uneraser will still be able to locate the files on the disk by analyzing the disk sector by sector and applying powerful filters to determine the beginning and end of files in supported formats.

Sounds complicated? To make it simpler, many files have characteristic features in their headers that allow programs to identify them. For example, many JPEG images have 'JFIF' in their headers as a characteristic signature. When SoftAmbulance Uneraser detects a characteristic signature, it then analyzes the file's header in order to determine its exact length, name and other properties, if possible. Deep Scan supports over types of files such as office documents, digital pictures, ZIP and RAR archives, sound and videos files.

Recover your files with confidence! SoftAmbulance Uneraser does not write anything onto the disk until you explicitly tell it to do so. The pre-recovery preview feature of SoftAmbulance Uneraser works in both free and full versions of the product, and allows previewing files you are about to recover.

Deleted files tend to overlap with each other, making it hard or impossible to pick the only perfect one. The preview feature takes care of the issue by displaying you the exact content of each file in a live, what-you-see-is-what-you-get fashion. Supporting the same file formats as Deep Scan, the preview feature lets you peek at more than 150 formats before a single byte gets written onto the disk. Don't wait till it's too late! Get your free copy and more info now at http://softambulance.com/file_unerase/features_file_uneraser.php.

How to recover data from Hard drives

Basically you should take care of two things first.

a)
you can still access your hard drive, and everything is ok with your operating system or
b) your computer froze and doesn't boot up, and possibly weird noises come from the hard drive.


1. After data loss, never write to the hard drive.

When data is lost on a hard drive, the first rule you should follow is a simple rule of common sense: don't write anything to that hard drive, until you recover what you have lost.

There is a very simple reason for this: when you delete something from your hard drive, the operating system (windows, mac os and linux for example) does not permanently delete that information. Instead, it only tells you that there is more free space that space is still occupied by your deleted information, but it changes it state, from occupied to free.

One thing is true when it comes to data on your hard drive what you see is not all you have on your hard drive.

This is true for lost files, but also for lost partitions. If you delete a partition, just leave it blank. You cannot see it, but data recovery software can. Same thing with formatted hard drives you can still recover from a full format.

How do I delete files forever? If you want to erase files for security and/or privacy reasons you should use commercial software that does that job or contact a specialized data recovery company.

2. Restore your backups

If you did your homework, you should have up-to-date backups of all your vital information. This is the time to check on those backups, and eventually restore them, in order to retrieve the lost data.

In the unlikely event that you don't have up-to-date backups of your data, you must start the process of data recovery, as explain in the following steps. But remember that in the future backups are your best chance of protecting vital and irreplaceable information. So back up often and store your backups in a safe location.

3. Don't install data recovery software on the same hard drive where the data loss occurred

Remember
step 1. If you install any software to the same hard drive where you lost data, you could overwrite that lost data forever.

4. Turn of your computer
To play it safe, right after your data loss, you should turn off the computer. Even the routine operation of the operating system depends on reads and writes from and to the hard drive, and your lost data can be overwritten in one of those.

5. Protect the hard drive

Remove the hard drive from the computer and connect another one, even an old one, as long as it had an operating system installed, so you can boot up your computer and later on analyse the hard drive where data loss happened. As an alternative, you can install your hard drive in another working computer, as a secondary drive, so you can access it without writing to it directly.


If your data loss happened because of a virus attack, be sure to have anti-virus software installed on the new hard drive.

Rescue disks to the rescue: If you are afraid of taking your computer apart, and you have a pre-prepared disk, you can boot your computer from a bootable floppy disk, CD or DVD and go from there.

6. Chose your data recovery software

There are several freeware choices on the Internet, as well as many demos of well known commercial software programs.

You can try, at your own risk experimenting with these programs. In any case, if you have any questions, doubts, or don't have the technical expertise to recover the lost data by yourself, you can always consult a data recovery company in your area.


What happens when hard drive failure occurs.

A hard disk failure occurs when it becomes impossible to access the hard drive, due to internal or external factors. The factors vary, but the most common one if known as ahead crashes. The head that reads the magnetic surface of the disk touches the metal surface, grinding against it and making normal reads impossible.

What makes up a hard drive? Platters, a motor, reading/writing heads and head actuators. The platters rotate using the motor and the heads read and write information in the place they are moved to by the actuator arm.

1. Shut off the computer and don't try to restart it

When a physical error occurs in a hard drive, the best thing to do is not to try to restart the computer system. Further damage can be done to the hard drive if you try a restart.

2. Secure the hard drive

If your hard drive failed because of an external problem, you should preserve the hard drive as-is. This means that, for instance if you had a flood and the hard drive came in contact with water, you should preserve the hard drive in water, and never try to open or dry it by yourself.

My computer was underwater! In this case, the best thing to do is to take your hard drive out and store it in a plastic container full of water. You will send that container to the data recovery company.

2. Choosing a data recovery company

When a physical error occurs you shouldn't try to fix it by yourself. Many times components must be repaired or even replaced and that can only happen in a clean room environment.

To maximize your chances of recovery, you should quickly find a data recovery company near you.

There are four main things you should consider when choosing a data recovery company:

a) The right equipment. The company you choose should have the right means to analyze and recover your lost data. Ask directly if they have at least one class 100 clean room.

b) A partnership opportunity. Will that company forge a partnership with your company? Do they offer training and long-term advices on how to better protect your data?

c) Expertise. Does that company specialize in the media you are trying to recover?

d) List of clients. Check out their website and the list of past clients. Does that list include big names, and a wide array of different industries? That is always a plus.

3. Send the hard drive for analysis

Most data recovery companies don't charge you anything if they cannot recover your data. They will probably give you an estimate on how much you are going to spend before you have to pay anything, so take advantage of that.

Shop around for better prices, but remember
step 2. Sometimes it's worth it to pay something extra, if you get better equipment and a better track record working for you.

When you decide, send your hard drive in for an estimate. Use preferably the wrapping material that came with your hard drive. If you bought the hard drive along with your computer, use a soft wrapping material, such as an anti-static electrostatic discharge (ESD) bag. Use foam to secure the hard drive inside and prevent sudden movements.

How to Search for Rapidshare Files using Google

RapidShare is a free and unlimited file hosting and file storage service that been used frequently to share big files such as music, mp3, video and software to other users in the world. With search technology of Google, we can search for uploaded and shared files in RapidShare.

To search for all RapidShare download links that been posted on the Internet, blogs and forums, use the following search string (including quote):

“rapidshare.de/files”

Alternatively, the following search term can be used to search for all URLs from rapidshare.de domain which, of course, includes all the download links (the search results will be lesser, as not all download URLs are been crawled and indexed):

site:rapidshare.de

You can refine the search by adding the keywords (file format or singer name or etc) that you want to search specifically. As the file name of the uploaded file in RapidShare is actually contained in the download links, so there’re several ways to search for just the file you want by narrowing down the search results.

To search for mp3 audio files only:

“rapidshare.de/files” mp3
site:rapidshare.de mp3
+inurl:mp3 site:rapidshare.de

Note: inurl will search for the URLs that contains the specified keywords only, while the other searches will search for the keywords beyond the URLs, as long as it fulfills the search criteria.

To search for files related to Jessica Simpson only:

“rapidshare.de/files” jessica simpson
site:rapidshare.de jessica simpson
+inurl:jessica|simpson site:rapidshare.de

To search for multiple file format, such as audio and music:

“rapidshare.de/files” mp3 OR wma OR ogg
site:rapidshare.de mp3 OR wma OR ogg
+inurl:mp3|wma|ogg site:rapidshare.de

Modify the above search string to search for the file type you want, such as avi, mpg, rm and wmv for video files or pdf, exe, doc, rar and zip for documents and software programs.

Note: Google will group together related and similar search results. Click on “repeat the search with the omitted results included” to expand the search results to get all RapidShare links.

Know What are rootkits and get protected from them

Introduction

RootkitRevealer is an advanced rootkit detection utility. It runs on Windows NT 4 and higher and its output lists Registry and file system API discrepancies that may indicate the presence of a user-mode or kernel-mode rootkit. RootkitRevealer successfully detects many persistent rootkits including AFX, Vanquish and HackerDefender (note: RootkitRevealer is not intended to detect rootkits like Fu that don't attempt to hide their files or registry keys). If you use it to identify the presence of a rootkit please let us know!

The reason that there is no longer a command-line version is that malware authors have started targetting RootkitRevealer's scan by using its executable name. We've therefore updated RootkitRevealer to execute its scan from a randomly named copy of itself that runs as a Windows service. This type of execution is not conducive to a command-line interface. Note that you can use command-line options to execute an automatic scan with results logged to a file, which is the equivalent of the command-line version's behavior.


What is a Rootkit?

The term rootkit is used to describe the mechanisms and techniques whereby malware, including viruses, spyware, and trojans, attempt to hide their presence from spyware blockers, antivirus, and system management utilities. There are several rootkit classifications depending on whether the malware survives reboot and whether it executes in user mode or kernel mode.


Types of Rootkit
  • Persistent Rootkits
A persistent rootkit is one associated with malware that activates each time the system boots. Because such malware contain code that must be executed automatically each system start or when a user logs in, they must store code in a persistent store, such as the Registry or file system, and configure a method by which the code executes without user intervention.

  • Memory-Based Rootkits
Memory-based rootkits are malware that has no persistent code and therefore does not survive a reboot.

  • User-mode Rootkits
There are many methods by which rootkits attempt to evade detection. For example, a user-mode rootkit might intercept all calls to the Windows FindFirstFile/FindNextFile APIs, which are used by file system exploration utilities, including Explorer and the command prompt, to enumerate the contents of file system directories. When an application performs a directory listing that would otherwise return results that contain entries identifying the files associated with the rootkit, the rootkit intercepts and modifies the output to remove the entries.

The Windows native API serves as the interface between user-mode clients and kernel-mode services and more sophisticated user-mode rootkits intercept file system, Registry, and process enumeration functions of the Native API. This prevents their detection by scanners that compare the results of a Windows API enumeration with that returned by a native API enumeration.

  • Kernel-mode Rootkits
Kernel-mode rootkits can be even more powerful since, not only can they intercept the native API in kernel-mode, but they can also directly manipulate kernel-mode data structures. A common technique for hiding the presence of a malware process is to remove the process from the kernel's list of active processes. Since process management APIs rely on the contents of the list, the malware process will not display in process management tools like Task Manager or Process Explorer.


Some Rootkit removal tools:

Unhackme

The rootkit installs a backdoor giving the hacker a full control of the computer. It hides their files, registry keys, and process names, and network connections from your eyes. Your antivirus could not detect such programs because they use compression and encryption of its files. UnHackMe allows you to detect and remove Rootkits.

License: Shareware
Language: English, Japanese, Russian
Release: 2006-12-20
Size: 1 Mb
Free: No

RootKit Hook Analyzer

RootKit Hook Analyzer is a security tool which checks if there are any rootkits installed on your computer which hook the kernel system services. Kernel RootKit Hooks are installed modules which intercept the principal system services that all programs and the operating system rely on. This program will display all kernel services and the responsible modules for handling them, along with company and product information.

License: Freeware
Language: English
Release: 2006-10-24
Size: 771 Kb
Free: Yes
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