Drive selection

ZAR has been discontinued

After about twenty years, I felt ZAR can no longer be updated to match the modern requirements, and I decided to retire it.

ZAR is replaced by Klennet Recovery, my new general-purpose DIY data recovery software.

If you are looking specifically for recovery of image files (like JPEG, CR2, and NEF), take a look at Klennet Carver, a separate video and photo recovery software.

This page lists all the data storage devices available for processing, both physical and logical. ZAR data recovery software groups all the devices in particular section. The following sections are possible:

Physical disks and basic partitions.
Software RAID. In this section ZAR places RAIDs for which it was able to parse metadata like LDM records (Windows software RAIDs), md-RAID and LVM data (Linux RAIDs).
Logical drives.
Reconstructed RAID. Here go RAIDs created both with "Define RAID manually" option and reconstructed using RAID recovery mode of ZAR.
Disk images.

For all devices, their capacities are listed. If a device happens to have a partition(s), it is listed under the corresponding device. Whenever possible, drive letters, filesystem types, RAID types, and partitioning schemes involved are displayed.

Right panel provides the detailed information on the selected device. The parameters and their possible values are described below.

Device type

Can be one of the following:

"Fixed" - non-removable device like a built-in hard disk.
"Removable" - removable device like a flash card in an USB card reader.
"Image file" indicates that the device image file is used rather than a physical device.

Model, Capacity, Revision, Serial, Bus type, Location

These are the parameters of the physical device. The serial number (if available) matches the serial number written on the device itself. The capacity is indicated in binary units (1 KB = 1024 bytes, 1 MB = 1024 KB and so on), and can be smaller than a vendor-specified capacity.

Filesystem type

Indicates filesystem type for the partitions, as listed in the corresponding partition table (MBR, GPT, or LDM). This does not necessarily match the actual filesystem type of the volume.

Partitions

For each partition, its partitioning scheme is displayed. The following values are possible:

MBR - Volume information is found in the old-style partition table.
GPT - The volume is listed in the GUID Partition Table (GPT).
Found - This entry describes a possible volume found by searching the disk directly (only appears after the scanning for missing partitions).
Manually defined - the volume you have specified manually.

Consisiting of

Only displayed for the complex devices from "Software RAID" and "Reconsturcted RAID" sections. Provides the exact location of the components on the corresponding devices.

Start offsets are in sectors (512 bytes per sector, 2048 sectors per megabyte).

RAID parameters

RAID type
Block size
Parity and data position for RAID5

More functions...

Clicking this button allows you to do the following actions:

S.M.A.R.T. information - displays the dump of the device S.M.A.R.T. information. For more details about interpreting this information, please refer to the S.M.A.R.T. quick reference.
Define partition manually - allows you to define the partition on the corresponding device. Read more on how to define partition manually.
Scan for missing partitions - for more details, please refer to how to search the device for the missing partitions.
Create image file - read more below.
Load image file - loads previously created image file. ZAR can load the image file created by third-party software if it is in proper format (plain sector-by-sector copy).
Define RAID manually - input a known set of RAID parameters and create a virtual RAID device using these parameters.

Create image file

Use this function to create the image of the device in the file. "Image file" is just a sector-by-sector copy of the device contents. Bad (unreadable) sectors are replaced with zeros (subject to bad sector handling settings). There is a restriction that you cannot save the file larger than 2GB on the FAT volume. This is because of the limitation of a FAT filesystem (applicable to both FAT16 and FAT32). Thus, you cannot take an image of the physical disk larger than 2GB and save it to the FAT volume.