User Guide

ERD Commander 2005
User’s Guide
Winternals Software Page 71
4.22 Disk Commander
4.22.1 Introduction to Disk Commander
Disk Commander is an advanced partition, volume, file and master boot
record (MBR) salvage and repair tool that ERD Commander 2005 includes
when you purchase it as part of the Winternals Administrator’s Pak. You can
use Disk Commander to:
• Salvage files from a volume that your operating system is having trouble
accessing.
• Salvage files from a volume that your operating system does not
recognize or provide a drive letter for.
• Recover deleted files.
• Repair volumes that have been damaged by a virus or been accidentally
deleted by FDISK or the Windows Disk Administrator.
Disk Commander consists of a wizard that guides you through the recovery
process.
Warning:
Some features of Disk Commander allow you to modify your disk in ways
that can potentially damage or render your volumes inaccessible. Because all
volumes on a disk share the same partition table it is possible that changes to one
volume can impact other volumes on the disk. It is highly recommended that you use
a conventional back up program to preserve as much of your data as possible before
using Disk Commander to perform repairs. This component of ERD Commander is
not available in the Emergency Download version of ERD Commander 2005.
4.22.2 Selecting a Drive Letter to Recover
If the data you wish to recover is on a volume that is relatively intact and has
a drive letter assigned to it, then you can select that drive letter and go
directly to recovering files. If it does not have a drive letter assigned then
there are several additional steps needed for Disk Commander to locate the
partition.