With technical advancements in the IT industry, computer users are experiencing immense changes in the storage devices. I still remember when I bought my first PC, it had a 40 GB hard disk. And mind you, it seemed huge at that time. Although the storage capabilities have definitely been on the rise like never before, there is always a need of having something to carry your data while on the move. For such purposes, we have got external hard drives today. The external hard drive is connected to the computer via a high-speed interface cable that allows it to communicate with the computer enabling two-way data transfer. These are portable devices and used on a plug-n-play basis. These HDDs are also prone to corruption due to various reasons such as boot sector corruption, virus infections, human errors, etc.

Consider a scenario wherein you have a 1 TB external HDD that you use to backup your data. You pass it to your friend to share some movies. When you connect the HDD to your PC after getting it back, you are unable to open the files and folders in the HDD as it is highly virus infected. Cause:

The cause, as mentioned previously, of this situation is that the HDD is virus infected and you need to get it fixed to recover your data. Resolution:

If the HDD is virus infected, then you should use an antivirus (with updated virus definitions) to remove the bugs. However, it may be possible that even after using the antivirus you are not able to access the data. The data obviously, apart from being huge, is very significant, and you cannot afford to lose it. In such cases, you should consider using a data recovery software for hard drive data recovery. These tools recovers all kinds of files such as MS Office files, images, videos, audio files, etc. These software are also capable of recovering data from lost partitions.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery software is a tool that enables you to recover lost data, such as files and folders. This read-only tool is also capable of recovering the lost emails from MS Outlook and Outlook Express. It is a highly interactive tool that supports about 185 different file formats and enables disk data recovery from various storage media such as USB flash drives, external hard drives, memory cards, and iPods. This Windows disk recovery tool is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, 2003 Server, XP, 2000 and also supports disk partition recovery from FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, VFAT, NTFS, and NTFS5 file systems.