Technical Zone

Imagine this scenario: your computer will not boot. It turns out your hard drive has crashed, and you have never taken a backup of your important files, let alone a recent one. What do you do? May this will help out you.

Zero Assumption Recovery (ZAR, for short) is a shareware-based utility that can scan your hard drive for files, even if it has been reformatted or is damaged. Using a fairly simple wizard-based user interface, ZAR will walk you through the steps to recover important data from an otherwise inaccessible hard drive.

Installation and payment options

Head over to the ZAR Web site, click on the ZAR Downloads page, and download the installer for General File Recovery (should be a file named zarXXsetup.exe where XX = the current version number). The installation routine is a simple one that you have probably seen dozens of times.

The download comes as the free trial shareware version with some important limitations. Per wizard cycle, you are allowed to select files in only four folders. While this may seem okay, be warned that if your My Documents folder is arranged like:

* My Documents
* Home
* My Pictures
* My Videos
* School
* Work

You will be unable to choose just the My Documents folder and get all those subfolders and their files. You will instead have to make multiple passes with ZAR in trial mode to get all your files restored.

The other option is to pay for a license key. Currently, ZAR costs $49.95 for a single-user instance, which, depending on the importance of the data you are going to lose, may just be worth it. The alternative is seeking out a computer repair shop to do the work, which might more than double that cost.

There are a couple of recovery options using ZAR. The first is to put the damaged hard drive in another system and install ZAR on that system.

The other option (if you do not have access to another system or that system has no open IDE/SATA ports) is to create a Windows bootable flash drive (as outlined by Greg Schultz) and install ZAR onto that device. Then, all you have to do is connect the flash drive to the system and boot from the USB device.

If your hard drive is only partially damaged and still boots, do not attempt to install ZAR on that hard drive. You may cause further damage to your data and make recovery totally impossible.

Restoring files

Note: This article is covering only the basic (and, yet, most common) restoration technique. Visit the ZAR Web site for more tutorials.

Once the setup has finished, ZAR will launch automatically.

The first screen you will see is a simple Welcome screen (Figure A). On this screen, you can enter your unlock code (if you purchased one), enter Advanced configuration (not covered in this tutorial since it will not be needed in most cases), or simply click Next to begin the recovery process.

Welcome screen

On the next screen (Figure B), you are prompted to choose the Recovery Type. For most individuals, the first radio button will be the option to choose. Also, most people will choose to keep the default choice for the Deleted Files option near the bottom. Click Next.

An interesting side bar: ZAR allows you to use this tool for free to recover images off a digital camera memory card. See the Web site for more information.
Figure B

Recovery Type

ZAR will take a moment or two to scan your system for devices to recover from. Once this process has completed, a screen like Figure C will appear. Choose the damaged hard drive from the list and click Next.
Figure C

Devices

After selecting the damaged device, you are prompted to choose the volume within that drive that is damaged (Figure D). Many hard drives will contain only one volume, so this is an easy choice. If you are unsure which volume to choose, you can always back up to this screen and choose another. Click Next after choosing the appropriate volume.
Figure D

Volumes

On the next screen, ZAR will perform a multi-step process involving the scanning of your hard drive for all file information and the plotting of different block types in a graphical presentation (Figure E). Depending on the size of your drive and the speed of your computer, this phase can take anywhere from a couple of minutes to several hours. The steps are:

* A Quick Pre-Scan — identifies the basic layout of your device
* Scan — Identify which blocks contain actual data
* Detect Volume Parameters — determines the file system type and maps whatever is left of the Master File Table
* Parse File System — Actually locates what blocks constitute files and directories and reconstructs the directory tree

Figure E

Scan

Once the scan is complete, you will automatically be taken to the next screen (Figure F). This screen allows you to choose the files and folders that you would like to recover by simply checking the box next to the item. If you are using the trial version, you are reminded that you are limited to four folders upon entering this screen.
Figure F

Files

The tree view should be a familiar layout and should make it simple to find and select the important files. There may also be folders named Fragments or LostFiles followed by a number, which may contain your files, especially if they have been recently deleted.

Finally, click Next to see the final screen (Figure G). This screen allows you to specify a location to save the files to. Choose a restore-to folder and click the Start Copying button to finish the process.
Figure G

Save

If you are using the trial version, you will need to start again completely from scratch and do this process again and again to recover all your files.

1. Boot performance is better Another common complaint about Vista has been the inordinate amount of time it can take to boot up. This might not be an issue for those who leave their systems on all the time, but if you turn off your computer every night, waiting around forever for it to get started in the morning can turn into a major annoyance. A Microsoft spokesperson indicated that the company’s goal for Windows 7 is a 15-second boot time, whereas three quarters of Vista users report boot times of more than 30 seconds. Although the beta of Win7 may not have achieved that 15-second mark yet for most users, the majority of beta testers I’m hearing from say it’s substantially quicker than Vista on the same hardware. That’s been my personal experience, as well. Since it is still a beta, it’s not unrealistic to hope that continued tweaking will get that time down further before the final release.

2. Explorer is no longer in pane in the behind: In a misguided attempt to alleviate the need for horizontal scrolling, Vista made the left navigation pane in Windows Explorer a constantly moving target. As you move your mouse, it will automatically scroll back and forth.
You can avoid the auto-scrolling by dragging the pane to make it wide enough to accommodate the entire tree, but that isn’t a good option on a small screen, such as the one on compact VAIO notebook. In Windows 7, the navigation pane stays still, so you no longer risk getting seasick from all the swaying back and forth.

3. Notifications can be fine-tuned In XP and Vista, you can disable the balloon notifications in the system tray, but what if you’d like to continue to get notifications from some applications but not from others? Windows 7 allows you to customize the behavior by simply clicking the little arrow next to the tray and selecting Customize. In the dialog box, choose which icons you want to appear in the tray. For each application, you can select whether you want to display notifications or hide them, as shown in Figure 1.

4. Side-by-side windows auto-size most of the monitors sold today come in a wide aspect ratio that’s better for watching movies, which is also handy for displaying two documents side by side on the screen. and they will automatically size themselves to each take up half the screen when you let go of the cursor. it goes back to the size it was before. How cool is that?

5. Home networking gets simple For home users without a lot technical know-how, networking has been made simpler in Windows 7. A new feature called HomeGroup allows all Windows 7 computers on a network to share files, printers, and other resources more easily. Thanks to Libraries (collections of certain types of files, such as music, photos, or documents), you can access files anywhere on the HomeGroup network as if they were stored locally, and you can search across the whole HomeGroup. Windows Media Player in Windows 7 can stream the music and videos on one PC in the network to another, and even play back songs.

6. Taskbar preview really works In Vista, you can hover over a taskbar button — for Internet Explorer, for example — and see that three instances of IE are open. You see the open pages stacked, but they’re so small that it’s difficult to really tell which page is which. In Windows 7, the preview feature has been enhanced so that it becomes an extremely useful function. Now when you over over a taskbar icon, you get actual previews that are placed side by side and are large enough for you to identify
And that’s not all. If you’re playing a video in one of the windows, that video plays in the preview window, too. And if you right-click the IE icon in the taskbar, you get a list of your IE history files, as shown in the figure

you can just click on any page and go on that link.

7. Windows 7 comes with IE 8, which provides such security enhancements to the Web browser as:
a) The SmartScreen filter– Replaces/expands upon the Phishing Filter in IE 7.
b) The XSS Filter — Protects against cross-scripting attacks
c) Domain highlighting — Puts emphasis on the relevant part of the URL so you can more easily determine the real location of the site you’re on
d) Better security for ActiveX and the ability to install controls on a per-site basis
e) Data Execution Prevention (DEP) enabled by default

8. AppLocker

Software Restriction Policies are included in XP and Vista and they seemed like a great idea. Administrators can use Group Policy to keep users from running particular programs that might present a security threat. But they’ve never been used that much because they aren’t easy to use.

Windows 7 has improved on the concept with a new feature called AppLocker. AppLocker is also included in Windows Server 2008 R2. It’s easier to use and gives administrators more flexibility and control. You can use AppLocker with domain Group Policies or on the local machine with the Local Security Policy snap-in. As you can see in Figure 8, AppLocker falls under the Application Control Policies node in the left pane of the snap-in.

Figure 8: AppLocker does the same thing as Software Restriction Policies, but does it better.

Win7 still supports the old Software Restriction Policies, too. Also note that AppLocker may not be available in some editions of Windows 7.

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