BANGALORE, INDIA: Data recovery tools may not be required everyday, but are remembered in desperation when sensitive data is lost. At that moment, a person would be willing to pay any amount to recover it. The open source world has quite a few good data recovery tools on offer, and we've given a collection of them on this month's Linux DVD.

In this article, we'll tell you how to use some of them. Before you start using any data recovery tools, you must remember that data recovery is a very sensitive job. If you've lost data on a hard drive, then the most important thing to remember is not to copy or install anything on it. You'll loose all chances of recovering the data if you do.

The other good practice in data recovery is to keep the hard drive on which the data has been lost as intact. Create an image of this hard drive, copy it to another location and then run your data recovery tools on it. This way, even if something happens to the image, your original hard drive remains intact, and so do your chances of recovering data from it.

Having said that, here are some data recovery tools and how to use them.

Scrounge-ntfs
It is a data recovery utility for NTFS file systems. It reads each block on the hard drive and tries to retrieve the data from it. To use Scrounge-ntfs, you need to know start sector, end sector, cluster size (size of one block of data on a partition) and MFT ( Master File Table). If you don't know the data, just type 'scrounge-ntfs -l disk'. After getting the data, type 'scrounge-ntfs -m 6291456 -c 8 /dev/hdd 206848 566964224'.

This will start recovering data from the drive and the data will appear by default in your root directory. However if you want to store the data in a specific directory then type 'scrounge-ntfs -m 6291456 -c 8 -o /root/recover /dev/hdd 206848 566964224'.

Scrounge-ntfs will recover all lost data from a NTFS file system and store them in your root directory.

The recovered jpeg files which are stored into your default directory.

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