In order to make the most out of advanced data recovery methods, it's best to know a bit about how data is stored on a hard drive. There's a hierarchical structure to the way your data is organized on your hard drive, and if one part of this structure is damaged, it doesn't necessarily mean that the rest of the data is lost as well. For example, if your system suffers from a severe crash or a failed operating system installation or re-partitioning, the master boot record (MBR) or partition sector may become damaged. In this case, your computer won't be able to read from the disk at all. But your important data, such as individual files and folders and the contents of your important files, may still be intact.

The problem is that the system doesn't know how to treat the disk. The partition table is supposed to tell the computer how the disk is divided, how many partitions are on the disk and what types of file system each partition uses. This is essential information for the system when it boots up. As soon as your computer turns on, it says, "Okay, I need to find these files in order to move forward." But because there is no valid master boot record, it can't find them. So it gets stuck.

This is a bit like if your hard drive were a book. A damaged partition table or master boot record is like having the table of contents ripped out of the front. The rest of the book is there, but the reader has no idea how to find it. The reader could simply read the book cover-to-cover until they found the information they were looking for, but this would obviously take a long, long time. What you need is a program to go through the book looking for the chapter headers so it can rebuild a new table of contents.

This is essentially what a disk scan does. A disk scan is a powerful tool included in the R-Studio data recovery suite. It takes a disk with a damaged master boot record or partition table and scans only the areas where partition information is usually stored. In most cases, it can quickly and efficiently find all the information it needs in order to locate and identify all of the partitions or logical disks. In fact, a disk scan can even restore the folder and file structures with full file names. This makes recovering files extremely easy.

Performing a disk scan is a time-saving data recovery technique that you should attempt prior to running a raw file search. A raw file search scans through the entire hard disk looking for file signatures from known file types. This is a very effective method for finding and recovering data from severely damaged hard drives, but it can be very time consuming. But by restoring the file and folder structures and partition tables with a disk scan, you can cut this process down to a fraction of the time.