Partition Find and Mount on Data Recovery CD/USB allows restoring files and folders from deleted or damaged partitions/volumes. You can mount a detected partition as a new drive and use Windows Explorer or Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier to copy required files and folders to an external drive.
Here "deleted partition/volume" means that it has not been overwritten - the disk has not been repartitioned after deleting or losing its contents. To try recovering files from re-formatted drives, use EaseUS Partition Master instead.
Please note that terms "volume" and "partition" mean the same in this article.
Click Find And Mount icon on Desktop to open the program. First, you see a list of all detected drives - hard disks and removable media.
Right-click the drive you want to restore and select Scan from menu.
In the Scan method selection window, click Thorough Scan. This ensures that all erased or damaged partitions are properly detected. In my own experience, the Intellectual Scan method sometimes works perfectly, but sometimes detects absolutely nothing.
Click Scan. The whole process will take about 10-40 minutes, but normally the lost partitions are found within first minutes. After all partitions have been located, it is safe to click Stop Scan on toolbar.
In the example below, a seemingly empty hard disk is used. Scanning reveals that there are two deleted partitions on the disk - these are listed in the Found partitions section.
There was Windows 8 Developer Preview installed on the disk, so the smaller partition is probably a hidden recovery volume, while the larger one is where Windows 8, installed programs and all user documents and settings are.
Let the scan finish.
After scanning has finished, a success dialog opens. Click Close.
To mount a detected partition and make its contents visible, right-click it and select Mount As from the menu.
The Mount Partition window automatically detects the first available drive letter. Leave a check mark in the Open volume in Windows Explorer box to see the contents of the detected partition after clicking OK.
Use Windows Explorer to copy important files from the mounted volume to an external disk.
If the hard disk has bad sectors or is otherwise damaged, use Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier for rescuing important files instead.
Which folders to copy and how much space is needed for these?
In Windows XP, files and settings of all users are in the Documents and Settings folder of the mounted drive.
In Windows Vista, 7 and 8, the folder is named Users.
Open the folder and find a subfolder with your user name - for example, Mirjam or John Ackenton.
You can always ignore folders with names Default, Default User, LocalService and NetworkService - these are needed for system accounts only and do not contain anything important.
Right-click your user folder and select Properties.
See what the Size: states. In this example, you need 638 MB (megabytes) of free space on external drive to recover the folder.
Click OK to close folder properties.
If you have more users on the computer, check and add the sizes of these folders, too. This calculates into free space required on your external disk.
To check the size of multiple folders at once, hold down Ctrl key while clicking the folders. Then use keyboard shortcut Alt+Enter to open folder properties.
In case you are using Shared Folders in Windows XP or Public Folders in Windows Vista, 7 or 8, add the size of All Users folder (Windows XP) or Public folder (Windows Vista, 7 and 8) to the result.
It is also recommended to copy Windows registry and event logs so that IT specialists are able to recover program settings and check what happened to the PC. Navigate to the Windows folder (this might also be named WinNT or WinXP) and expand System32 folder. Now right-click the folder named config and click Properties to check its size. Add the result to the total size of user folders.
To see how much free disk space is on your external disk, open My Computer and see the Free Space column. In this example, there is 223 GB (gigabytes) available on the external hard drive.
If you have enough free space on the external drive, you can also copy the Program Files, Program Files (x86) (only in 64-bit Windows) and ProgramData (only in Windows Vista, 7 and 8) folders.
Compressing files and folders with 7-Zip
Because www.winhelp.us Data Recovery CD/USB does not have Compressed Folders feature, you should use 7-Zip to compress folders or files if there is not enough space available on the external drive.
Compression works best with typical documents (text files, Word, Excel, PowerPoint files, etc) and programs. Such files lose 50-90% of their size after compressing.
Multimedia files, such as music, videos and photos, are often already in compressed format and lose about 1% of their size only.
First, select the items you want to compress. Then right-click the selection, open 7-Zip submenu and click Add to archive.
Add to archive window opens. First, click the ... button to select your external drive as destination folder for the archive (aka Compressed Folder in Windows).
Click My Computer on the left side and double-click your external drive in the list. Then click Open.
Back in the Add to Archive window of 7-Zip, make sure that Archive format is set to Zip and Compression level is Normal. This ensures compatibility with Windows Compressed Folders.
Then click OK to add the selected items to the archive/compressed folder.
You might see some "Access is denied" warnings after the process is complete. This often applies to users' folders on Windows Vista and Windows 7 where special links (junctions) to My Documents, My Pictures and other folders appear to maintain compatibility with programs created for Windows XP.
Ignore these errors by clicking Close.
Copying files and folders
First, select the files and folders you want to copy. To select multiple items, hold down Ctrl key while clicking the necessary items. To select all items in a folder, use keyboard shortcut Ctrl+A.
Then use keyboard shortcut Ctrl+C to copy the selected items. Navigate to your external drive and use keyboard shortcut Ctrl+V to paste selected items on the disk.
If you get errors while copying items, use Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier instead to work around bad sectors and otherwise unreadable data.
Unmounting the damaged or deleted partition
After you've copied all items you need, return to Partition Find and Mount. Right-click the mounted partition and select Unmount.
A Confirm dialog appears. Click Yes.
