How can recovery software help if the partition tables are damaged?
A recovery utility will automate these methods of discovery as follows:
- Discover an error and suggest that you choose a partition and make it active (even FDISK does this).
- Perform a free disk space scan to look for the partition boot sector or remaining data from deleted partition information in order to try to reconstruct the Partition Table entry for the deleted partition.
- Perform a scan of the entire disk space to look for a partition boot sector or remaining data from the damaged partition information in order to try to reconstruct Partition Table entry for the damaged partition entry.
Why is Partition Boot Sector so Important?
If data recovery software finds the Partition Boot Sector, all necessary parameters to reconstruct partition entries can be found here.
What Happens in This Case: Partition entry is deleted then recreated with other parameters and re-formatted?
To further describe this case, the original partition entry is replaced by a new re-constructed one. All file partitions work fine and drive operation continues until, at a later date, someone recalls some missing and important data on the original partition. If MBR, Partition Table, Volume Sectors backup was created before partition re-construction (for example, Active@ Partition Recovery and Active@ UNERASER can do this), you can virtually restore the old, damaged partition entry and look for your data (provided it has not been overwritten with new data yet). Some advanced recovery tools also have an ability to scan disk surface and try to reconstruct the previously deleted partition information from the residual data of remaining information (i.e. perform virtual partition recovery). However it is not guaranteed that you can recover anything.
