Tech support

Yes, ZAR can still recover files even if the MBR is missing. Either manual or automatic scan mode is available.

Yes.

This is not a problem for ZAR. Its autodetection feature will take care of this without requiring any additional input from you.

No, we do not support these types of device. There are separate utilities available from other vendors for this.

No. A drive is beyond usual software repairs if it cannot be recognized by the BIOS.
It requires either physical repairs or firmware reconstruction. This assumes everything is properly configured (check the data and power cables).

ZAR never modifies a damaged disk. You can copy data off the damaged disk using either version, reformat the disk and copy the data back to it. Once again, ZAR is read-only.

While "checking disk integrity" FDISK writes hexadecimal F6h into the first sector on each track. If you have accidentally deleted a volume, do not try to create it again using FDISK - as it will corrupt your data further.

Backup your data immediately! This is an indication that one of your hard disks is physically failing.

When an old generation WD drive is sitting singly on its channel (with no CD-ROM or other HDD attached on the same IDE channel), and the jumper on the disk is set to Master, the system BIOS may refuse to detect the disk, thus rendering the system unbootable.
Solution: if you experience these symbthoms, remove the jumper from the HDD, or set it so it does not short any pins. This will set the drive to Single (also known as Single Master) mode, and it will operate properly.

We receive many requests from people asking, "I have a system with Celeron a 400MHz at 600MHz, [other system info]. It was running for a month, but now the system refuses to start ("DISK BOOT FAILURE" error). What's the problem?". The problem is that the IDE controller and/or hard disks are sensitive to overclocking. Actually things are even worse: CPU and memory problems can be easily determined by stress testing, but rarely does one test the disk subsystem. Later on a heavy load is put on the disks and they fail.
If this happens, the first thing to be done (before proceeding with data recovery) is to revert the system frequencies to their rated values. Failure to do so may lead to further corruption of the drive's data.

Remapping is an automatic drive self-repair technique. In order to allow this, some sectors on the drive are initially not used, but form a ''spare pool" instead. Once a write error occurs, the sector that causes it (a bad sector) is ''replaced'' with a spare sector from the above-mentioned pool. This is done by redirecting all the bad sector access requests to the corresponding spare sector via the on-disk controller, eliminating the need of any software handling of the error. The bad sector is thus excluded from use without any loss of capacity.