Ontrack EasyRecovery Knowledge Base

Ontrack EasyRecovery Free edition for Windows or Mac can be used to recover data from USB flash drives that have suffered logical errors, corruption, and accidental deletion. Download our free EasyRecovery software at https://www.ontrack.com/en-gb/data-recovery-software/. Data recovery services, available from Ontrack, are required if the drive has physical damage.

Ontrack EasyRecovery Photo Professional software works with Windows or Mac and is capable of recovering photos from flash drives that have encountered logical errors, corruption, and accidental deletions. Data recovery services are available from Ontrack if the device has suffered physical damage.

Ontrack EasyRecovery might be able to find the names, sizes, dates and other information about your files, but this isn't a guarantee that those files can be recovered, therefore we built a preview feature so that you can see whether or not the files are recoverable.

The Free, trial and full (paid) versions of EasyRecovery all allow you to preview files to make sure they're recoverable.

To preview files, after EasyRecovery has completed the scan, in the EasyRecovery scan results please single-click the name of a file (not a folder) that's a known type such as a Word document, an Excel spreadsheet, a photo, a PDF file, or a video for example.  If it's a document, PDF or photo, the file should display in the Preview window in EasyRecovery (which is right above the file list), and if it's a video, at least the first 30 seconds should play.

Here's what a photo and an Excel spreadsheet would look like in the preview window. 

If it says "No Preview Available" then the file isn't recoverable by the software, but might be recoverable by our more powerful in-lab recovery service.

You can easily recover all your deleted or formatted data from the RAID drives. Once you rebuild the RAID, you can select and scan the drives or the virtual RAID drive. Once the scan is completed, select the files you want to recover from the scanned list. Then select ‘Recover’, choose the destination, and click ‘Start Saving’.

Yes, the software is able to recover data from such a condition. There are many situations when two or more RAID drives can become logically corrupt and the normal rebuild operation fails. Ontrack EasyRecovery Technician software is specially designed for instances of severe RAID array corruption and efficiently recovers all the data from the drives.

No, there is no need to use the RAID controller card while recovering data from the problematic RAID Drives using RAID recovery software by Ontrack.

If the software fails to create a likely RAID reconstruction candidate, use the ‘Create Virtual Drive’ option which allows you to use the virtual RAID drive to perform raw recovery, and search for the lost volumes in it.

In order to perform RAID Recovery, the software requires all your member RAID drives. You also need to specify the proper sequencing of these drives for a successful recovery.

Most of the time, data is recoverable after reformatting a RAID 5 volume, depending upon the way you in which it is reformatted. In the Windows operating system data is still recoverable if we reformat and create an empty volume. The original data still exists on the drive in the ‘Free and Available’ space. However, when a low-level format, is performed by the RAID controller utility it completely wipes every single block on a drive overwriting any data in the free space. A low-level format is slower than a high-level format.

Yes, if the NAS is based on RAID 0, 5, or 6, then the software can recover your data. You just need to specify the parameters, and if you don’t know them, then you can use the ‘Don’t Know start sector of drives’ feature.

To efficiently recover data from a RAID array you need all the member RAID drives. Besides, the drives should be in the proper sequence.

Ontrack EasyRecovery Technician for Mac does not support data recovery from RAID arrays. The Ontrack EasyRecovery Toolkit supports data recovery from Windows and Mac drives, but it must run on a Windows machine.

If the drive is displayed in Apple’s Disk Utility application, the software can perform data recovery on a logically corrupt drive. However, the software does not recover from a physically damaged hard drive or SSD.

It is highly likely that your SD card has been corrupted. There are a number of possibilities leading to SD card corruption and data loss such as system incompatibilities, damage due to mishandling, driver failures, write-protection, etc. Follow these steps to recover photos, videos, and music files from the camera card:Connect a card reader or camera to the computer to access the camera card.Download and launch Ontrack EasyRecovery Photo on your computer.Select the camera card you want to recover. Click Scan.A list of recoverable photos, videos, and music files will appear. Preview the files then click ‘Recover’.Select a location to save the recovered files. Click Start Saving.

If your hard drive is physically damaged, contact us at Ontrack for in-lab data recovery services. The services team will be able to recover photos from the damaged hard drive. For more information, you can submit your drive for a free data recovery evaluation at https://www.ontrack.com/services/data-recovery/quote/ or contact at any of our global locations listed here: https://www.ontrack.com/contact-us/.

If Ontrack EasyRecovery scans the drive and ends the scan displaying a message that says "No Files Found", please close Ontrack EasyRecovery, then right-click the Ontrack EasyRecovery icon, click "Run as Administrator" and scan the drive again.  If the same message appears when running as Administrator, please contact support.  support@ontrack.com

The amount of data that's selected to recover is shown in the bottom of the Ontrack EasyRecovery window, on the left side.  You can click the check box on the top left (in this photo, it's immediately to the left of OSDisk (C:).  Please make sure you haven't selected more than you have free space available on the destination drive.

Here are some troubleshooting steps in case you'd like to try troubleshooting this on your own:

• Make sure to copy and paste the code, making sure not to pick up a space on either end.
• Make sure there's an active internet connection.
• Temporarily turn off antivirus and firewall when activating the software.
• Make sure you're trying to activate the same product you purchased (for example, a code for  Ontrack EasyRecovery Photo Professional for Windows  for Windows won't activate the trial of Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional for Windows.
• Make sure you're entering the code in the right place.  The icon shown here will take you to the right window:

If you'd like for us to troubleshoot the problem, then please send our support department a clear screen shot of the code being entered as well as the title bar in Ontrack EasyRecovery to support@ontrack.com so we can troubleshoot this.  Here is a screenshot example. 

With this additional information, we can begin troubleshooting in order to be able to provide you with an accurate answer ASAP.