A computer hard drive can be divided into various partitions, for effective management of your valuable data. A hard drive can have maximum four primary partitions and one among them can be used as a boot partition. The boot partition must be set as active. You can set only one partition as active at a time. If you set more than one partitions as active, MBR (Master Boot Record) may not be able to identify that which partition should be used to boot. In case if there is any problem with boot configuration, you cannot boot your system and come across critical data loss situations. At this point, you need to opt for data recovery software to extract lost data from hard disk.

When you use your hard disk for the first time, you must make it ready to be used. For this, formatting is required. You can create hard drive partitions while formatting. At the same time, a file system is also set. It is possible to select a file system of your choice, which is supported by the host operating system. After you install the operating system, a boot loader and Master Boot Record is also set on your hard drive.

In case you forgot to set a primary boot partition as active, BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) cannot boot your operating system. It generally causes error messages similar to the following ones:

No boot device available

NO ROM BASIC – SYSTEM HALTED

When BIOS cannot found boot device, a hard-coded BASIC interpreter is executed in place of it. If your system is configured as dual-boot, then you need to use a partition to boot from.

Similar boot problems may also occur if some critical data structures of your computer are corrupt. Such significant metadata structures include file system, boot loader, Master Boot Record (MBR), and VBR (Volume Boot Record).

In such cases, you cannot extract your mission-critical data from hard drive and need of data recovery solutions arises. Recovery is best possible using powerful commercial programs, known as data recovery tools.

The applications are capable of thoroughly scanning entire hard drive and retrieving all lost, missing, and inaccessible data from it. Such file data recovery software are totally safe and easy to use with read-only behavior and highly-interactive user interface.

Tom Patrick is a magazine editor currently researching on data recovery