hard drive not showing

Now data recovery has become about pattern recognition of individual file types. This has the advantage of making the recovery more robust and consistent because it is no longer dependent on the filesystem, so it makes no difference if a disk has been formatted or not. Now the only requirement for a deleted file to be recoverable is for it to be present, irrespective of the filesystem. It also makes it filesystem independent. It works on hard disks, hard drive not showing USB flash sticks, USB hard disks & SSD’s, SD Cards, digital cameras, Android phones & tablets, or anything else that can be plugged into a Mac. OS X does not even necessarily have to be able to mount the device (so it can work on devices which do not show up in the Finder).

It will work on anything that appears in Disk Utility. (Technically speaking: The only requirement is that OS X provides a POSIX node, for example /dev/rdisk3). Therefore you may be surprised to find that it will recover data from devices that do not show up as a volume. And since it is fault-tolerant (which gives it the capability of scanning around bad sectors), it can even be used to recover data from faulty media, which is sometimes useful even if the files have not been deleted, because it will successfully read and extract the files irrespectively.

So now if you have a disk image that will not mount, or some other file or folder with data inside it that you would like to extract the contents of, it is possible. This also opens up some forensics capabilities of the software as it extracts and decodes everything. If you run it over your browser history, for example, it’ll extract all the text and images from it as well as other file types. This is also useful for digital forensics.

The way deleted file recovery software works these days is by reading every byte on the volume, and as it reads through it searches every byte on the disk for common patterns in each individual dvd disk size file type that it supports (or for patterns in general, for example it can recover all ASCII text found anywhere on a drive). If it encounters the start of a recognizable file it will record the location of that, and then search for whatever middle parts of the file that it can, and search for the end of it to finish it. Once it has a good idea of what the entirety of the file is, it will provide a real thumbnail preview of that file, and display it as an option to be recovered.