Partitioning in a hard disk refers to the segregation of the storage media into logical spaces, called a partition. This process helps you in keeping similar type of data in a single partition. For example, if you have an external hard disk then you can make two partitions in which you can keep software dumps in one of the partitions and games or movies in the other partition. So, partitioning is a very effective practice that enables you to keep your hard disks healthy for a longer duration. However, sometimes the partitions may get corrupt and inaccessible due to various reasons such as human errors, virus infections, power outages, etc. In such cases, you should employ appropriate measures to rectify the issue. But, if you are not able to sort the problem then you should use a third-party partition recovery software to recover the trapped data.

Consider a scenario wherein you have a 160 GB external hard disk. In this, you have created two partitions for data storage in your system. One day, when you try to access the drive you are unable to do so. An error message is displayed, which could be either of the following messages: The volume X: is not formatted. Do you want to format it now? The disk in drive X: is not formatted. There was an error accessing drive X:. The disk is not formatted. In addition, when you try to run CHKDSK for the mentioned drive, you are unable to do that as well. An error is displayed, that is: “The type of the filesystem is RAW. CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.” Cause:

The root cause for the aforementioned error messages is that the file system has corrupted. The possible reasons behind this situation are: Damaged records in Master File Table (MFT) and MFT mirror. Corruption in partition table, LDM database, or the volume boot sector. Resolution:

To resolve this situation, you should format the volume as suggested in the error message. However, by doing this you would lose all your data. Also, sometimes even after formatting the volume you are not able to access the partition. In such cases, you use a third-party partition recovery tools to recover partition. Such read-only tools are able to recover trapped data from the inaccessible partitions without overwriting the original content by using sophisticated scanning algorithms.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is a partition recovery software that recovers lost, formatted, or deleted data from FAT and NTFS file systems. It is capable of recovering more than 185 different file types from various storage media such as hard drives, external hard disks, pen drives, iPods, etc. In addition, this Windows data recovery tool is able to recover deleted emails from MS Outlook and Outlook Express. It is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, Server 2003, XP, and Server 2000.