Jonny Defh
Jonny a research student of computer and hard disk doing research on Mac recovery software. He is also a freelancer for http://www.macintosh-data-recovery.com/detail-features.php
Articles by Jonny Defh
November 21, 2009
In Mac OS X operating system, the File Vault is a utility that protects your critical and confidential data and information from unauthorized access. This tool come in-built with Mac OS X 10.3 Panther and later versions. The File Vault is a significant application that uses encrypted file system tha...
November 19, 2009
In Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Boot Camp is an effective tool, which help you to install Microsoft Windows 7, Vista or XP on Intel-based Mac computers. It guides you through non-destructive hard drive re-partitioning and using Mac OS X disk to install MS Windows drivers.
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November 17, 2009
HFS+ or HFS Plus is a reliable and widely used file system of Mac OS X operating system. The file system is made up of a number of components and Catalog File is the most important among them. Catalog File keeps record of all the files and directories. This is a B-tree that is divided in fixed-size ...
November 12, 2009
In Mac OS X, the DVD RAM denotes to DVD format, where you can repeatedly erase and record data. Such disks could be used by all the DVD RAM drive installed on your Mac computer. You can use Mac OS X to record data to and erase data from the DVD drive. This is an additional feature added to Mac OS X....
November 06, 2009
Linux file system is made up of several components and /etc/mtab and /etc/fstab are most important among them. For proper functioning of your file system and computer system, these data structures must be intact and in working state. Any damage to file system components may make it unusable and caus...
November 02, 2009
In Microsoft Windows computer, boot record is the most critical data structure that enables booting of your system and make your system usable. In some situations, when you start your Microsoft Windows computer, you might find some errors related to missing boot record. These errors prevent you from...
October 30, 2009
In some situations, where you attempt to start your Microsoft Windows XP computer, it stops responding. Sometimes it gives you some STOP error messages or simply shows a black or blue screen that does not allow you to log into your system. This behavior of Windows computer renders all of your missio...
October 28, 2009
In Microsoft Windows, Disk Administrator is a useful tool that provides you a number of options to manage your hard drive. Using this feature, you can delete, shrink, format or merge hard drive partitions and assign drive letters. But in some cases, when it writes disk signatures to the disk partiti...
October 26, 2009
A significant bug in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard could affect you, if you have upgraded from Mac OS X Leopard to Mac OS X Snow Leopard with guest account enabled. This bug, although difficult to reproduce, could result into irretrievable loss of user account after using the guest account. When this p...
October 23, 2009
CHKDSK (CheckDisk) is a command-line utility in Microsoft Windows operating system, which ensures the file system integrity. It detects and fixes minor file system logical errors. The utility can also check hard drive for bad sectors and other physical errors. The chkdsk operation is performed when ...
October 20, 2009
Microsoft Windows XP supports two hard drive file systems: FAT (File Allocation Table) and NTFS (New Technology File System). NTFS5 is the latest development by Microsoft in the series of file systems. It is more advanced than previous versions and provides better performance. To take benefit of the...
October 16, 2009
In Microsoft Windows operating system, you can expend or resize the hard drive partitions using third party utilities. These tools can be used on both Dynamic disks and Basic disks. Before you can run these utilities, you must list and then select object to give it focus. In some cases, when you exp...
October 14, 2009
The kernel serves as the core of a computer operating system, including Mac OS X, located at a protected area of memory. It provides basic system services, such as memory management, file management, Input/Output management, process management and more. For a Mac system to boot and function properly...
October 09, 2009
An improper or disrupted Mac OS X upgrade can leave your system in unstable state. Alternatively, you might experience issues running applications or performing other system related tasks. For instance, you may encounter problems downloading email attachments. To fix them, one of the prime workaroun...
October 07, 2009
Safari, the Apple Web Browser, is a feature-rich product with all modern functionalities. Safari 4 is a new release giving improved look and fast usage, better than its predecessors. But in some cases, installing the release proves susceptible to host system. After installing Safari 4, the Mac OS X ...
October 05, 2009
A Mac OS X computer system might behave abruptly after you install any major Mac OS X update. In severe situations, the computer might fail to boot. To solve these problems, you might need to reinstall the operating system which deletes and causes data inaccessibility. If a valid data backup is not ...
October 01, 2009
The hard disk storage space is allowed to be partitioned into maximum of four primary partitions. These primary partitions are defined by respective 16-byte entries that form the hard disk partition table. It is located in disk MBR (Master Boot Record). When you install Windows or any service pack o...
September 25, 2009
You might experience several issues while using Boot Camp, which might compel you to reformat the entire hard disk. In such cases, you require a complete data backup or a powerful Mac Data Recovery tool to recover seemingly lost data.
For example, consider that you try to use Boot Camp to instal...
September 19, 2009
You might experience several disk space issues with your Windows based computer system. On occasion, you might observe Windows Explorer or Disk Management utility showing less amount of hard disk space, when actually the disk space is quite large. To deal with such problems, you might need to delet...
September 17, 2009
Aperture is a Mac OS X photography software. To add data protection to the application, Apple includes a feature called Vault that archives the image library. Using vault feature, you can create backups of your library on any external device and restore it, when required. On occasion, you cannot res...
September 15, 2009
After you boot into your Mac system and start it, you generally come across the login window or Finder. But if the startup process doesn't accomplish successfully and you observe unexpected system behavior, you might need to perform 'Erase and Install' to solve it. If a valid backup is not available...
September 11, 2009
Mac OS X installer is an application that extracts and then installs all the files out of .pkg packages. It allows installing Mac OS X. But at times, you might fail to do so on a particular volume. The volume might appear 'grayed out' or dimmed in Mac OS X installer and thus, you cannot install Mac ...
September 09, 2009
When you upgrade a basic disk to dynamic disk in Windows 2000, the legacy partition table entries, called hard-linked entries, are still retained in its MBR. Windows use these entries to recognize them while performing a new installation. But this behavior sometimes causes errors for Disk Management...
September 07, 2009
A standard partition table can hold information about only of four partitions. It implies that at one time, a hard disk could be partitioned into maximum of four partitions, called primary partitions. However, you can also create an extended partition that stores information about other partitions. ...
September 01, 2009
Microsoft Windows XP operating system supports two hard drive file systems: NTFS (New Technology File System) and FAT (File Allocation Table). NTFS is more advanced than FAT and thus provides high performance. To avail benefits of high performance, several users convert a FAT hard drive into NTFS ha...
August 27, 2009
In Mac OS X, Time Machine is a powerful and advanced backup tool, that was first introduced in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. It is designed to work with Time Capsule. It create incremental and secure backup of all sorts of files, which can be restored when required. Time Machine allows you to restore entir...
August 25, 2009
Sometimes, when you try to access data from a Windows hard drive or attempt to store data on drive and install software on it, the hard drive could not be read. You come across disk read errors and thus the installation or accession fails. This behavior renders all of your hard drive partitions inac...
August 20, 2009
Intel based computer systems rely on system BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) for loading and executing the bootstrap code. BIOS bootstrap function generates the int 0x19 that loads first sector of hard drive in memory at the segment address 0000:7C00H. First physical sector of hard drive is known as...
August 17, 2009
There are some situations where your Mac OS X hard drive might become unreadable and stored data might get rendered inaccessible. This problem could occur due to corruption to the hard drive logical structure, which might be because of file system corruption, improper system shutdown, virus infectio...
August 13, 2009
In computing, the term upgrade denotes the replacement of product with newer version of same product. This is generally used in application or system software for replacement with better or newer version to improve their characteristics or bring them up to date. Like other software vendors, Microsof...
August 10, 2009
A Mac OS X hard drive can be divided into several volumes. These volumes work as individual drives and can be used to store different kinds of data and software. Every Mac volumes is made up of four general items: files, directories, file threads and directory threads. In order to define these items...
August 04, 2009
When you boot a Linux based system, it runs a boot-time fsck, if find any inconsistencies with the file system. /etc/fstab is the file that contains the descriptive information about disk file systems. So, any errors in the file could also result in fsck errors. However, if all the entries in /etc/f...
July 28, 2009
Disk Utility is an extremely important and useful tool in Mac OS X that is used to carry out a number of hard drive related operations and disk resizing is one of them. Using Disk Utility, you can easily resize your Mac OS X hard drive without losing your valuable data stored on the drive. But in so...
July 23, 2009
Linux superblock is responsible for holding general information about the file system. An Ext3 file system is different from a ReiserFS file system because they have dissimilar file system type, size and mount status defined in their corresponding superblocks. Among other information, superblock als...
July 20, 2009
MobileMe users can store their precious movies, digital pictures, songs and personal files either on Mac OS X hard drive or on the iDisk. From iDisk, you can access all of your valuable data remotely. The iDisk, which integrates with Mac OS X, looks like a network drive and is mounted automatically ...
July 15, 2009
Linux is considered to be a relatively reliable operating system. But if crashes unexpectedly due to power outage or kernel bug, it can catch odds of getting corrupted. The next time when you restart your Linux-based system, fsck runs and automatically checks the file system for errors. If it fails,...
July 10, 2009
Kernel is a key component of Mac OS X operating system. It is responsible for managing system resources and allowing applications to be executed. In some cases, this core component of operating system becomes faulty and you come across "Kernel Panic" and some error message while starting your comput...
July 08, 2009
When you boot a Linux based system, the first thing that occurs is initialization of your hardware. After this, the Grub boot loader loads from MBR (Master Boot Record) of hard drive based on its configuration. You might see a boot menu displaying all the operating systems in a list from which you c...
July 02, 2009
The final step of Linux boot process is init process, which starts a system process defined in /etc/ initab file. init config file then directs the init process and the shell script /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit runs. Linux distros put some startup scripts in rc subdirectories, particularly at /etc/rc.d to t...
June 26, 2009
In computing, kernel is the core component of an operating system. Kernel´s responsibilities include managing system resources (communication between software and hardware components). As an essential part of computer operating system (such as Mac OS X), the Kernel offers lowest-level abstract...
June 23, 2009
The DVD RAM refers to a DVD format, where you can constantly store and delete data. Such DVD disks can be used by most of the DVD RAM drive install Mac OS X computer. You can use Mac OS X to format the DVD RAM and write new data on it.This is a new feature added in Mac OS X operating system. In some...
June 20, 2009
Root device refers to the device from which a Linux system boots from. While booting if you are getting errors that system cannot access or open the root device, you might need to install a fresh copy of operating system. Thus, you are always suggested to maintain a good data backup of all valuable ...
June 18, 2009
When you start a Linux system, BIOS first select the boot device and load the boot sector. Further, it looks to load the kernel image, after which the setup code runs to execute the Kernel. If your system is prompting that it can´t find the kernel image, the system will fail to boot. One of th...
June 16, 2009
Mandrake Linux or Mandriva Linux is the operating system that uses RPM Package Manager. Since it offers advanced functionalities and various security features, this operating system is popular among users. But sometimes, you find that a Mandrake-based system fails to boot and you cannot access the s...
June 12, 2009
When you connect an external hard drive to your Mac, the drive may not be recognized and you might receive drive inaccessibility error messages. It could be due to logical damage of the hard drive and may cause data loss. You need to opt for Mac Data Recovery tools to resolve such situations. In thi...
June 11, 2009
The Operating system is the most essential part of a computer system. Operating system vendors periodically release updates to increase their performance and add new functions. In Ubuntu Linux you can use apt-get for complete up-gradation. Apt-get is a powerful command line utility, which is used to...
June 09, 2009
When you connect an external hard drive to your Mac, the drive may not be recognized and you might receive drive inaccessibility error messages. It could be due to logical damage of the hard drive and may cause data loss. You need to opt for Mac Data Recovery tools to resolve such situations. In thi...
June 05, 2009
At times, when you attempt to boot your Linux system, you encounter an error message. The reason behind a boot time error message depends on the issue, which can be a software or hardware problem. An error message generally appears because of superblock corruption, file system (viz. ext2, ext3 or Re...
May 20, 2009
In Linux and UNIX operating systems, daemon is the computer program that runs in the background other than direct control of a user. You can use these daemons to configure your hardware (like devfsd) and perform tasks like scheduled run of cron in your Linux system. But sometimes, these programs fai...
May 13, 2009
Under certain situations, your Mac operating system can not read data from an external hard drive. The problem could be due to damaged or corrupted hard drive metadata structure and other similar issues. Such situations make all your critical and valuable data inaccessible and cause serious data los...
May 08, 2009
Intel and PowerPC Macs use different native schemes. Where Intel-based Mac systems are compatible with Apple_partition_scheme, PowerPC-based Mac can only be used with GUID_partition_scheme. These incompatibility issues can create data loss situations. Hence to recover the lost data, you need to use ...
April 29, 2009
The advanced computer users divide their hard drive into various partitions. These can be primary, extended and logical partition. The process of creating various partitions on a hard drive is known as partitioning. While partitioning provides you various benefits, if not performed systematically, i...
April 24, 2009
Mac OS X based systems allow making HFS Wrapper for its volumes. An HFS+ volume can be made to contain within an HFS volume in a manner that makes it look like HFS volume and not HFS Plus volume to computer system. It proves beneficial in systems with no support to HFS+ volumes. So if system´s...
April 22, 2009
Upgradation of Linux operating system enables you to use the advanced features provided in the upgraded version. After upgradation process is complete, you need to restart the system. Once the computer is restarted, you might receive an error message which does not allow you to boot the computer. Fu...
April 20, 2009
When you start your Mac computer, you may get ´damaged or incompatible hard drive´ error messages. These errors make your system unbootable or the hard drive inaccessible. It results into critical data loss situations and lead to Mac Data Recovery. After unexpected system shutdown or som...
April 13, 2009
Mac hard drives sometimes show unexpected behavior related to hard disk space. Users report that though the hard disk has fair amount of free space available, it incorrectly reports being full. As the Mac hard drive fails to correctly deal with free hard disk space, this result into issues like fail...
April 08, 2009
The computer is an essential part of our today´s life, we can store every single bit of data on it. But when sometimes the computer program that is loaded in your computer and copy itself and affect your computer without your knowledge or permission. However the word virus is generally used, t...
March 31, 2009
In ext3 file system, journal is the most used and important file, since it is a journaled file system. But due to a drawback that ext3 doesn´t support checksumming while writing to the journal, file system becomes prone to corruption and hence may require Linux Data Recovery. In general terms,...
March 27, 2009
Alike other operating systems´ kernel, Linux Kernel is the resource of various services to the system. While the Linux Kernel errors occur, it generally indicates problems with file system or some memory that it can´t get access to. In some cases, the solution may require Linux Data Reco...
March 24, 2009
Ext3 is a journaled file system used for many Linux distributions. Journaling feature helps keeping the system afar most of Linux Recovery needs that can occur due to unexpected system shutdown, file system errors, application (like virus) issues etc. But the issues like excessive ext3 fragmentation...
March 19, 2009
Ext2 and ext3 are the two most widely used file systems used for Linux. Superblock is the significant metadata structure that holds information like file system type, its status and size and information about other metadata structures. So if due to some errors file system becomes inaccessible, the r...
March 17, 2009
Ext2 and ext3 file systems space is divided into blocks, which are further organized into what we call as block groups. For each group block, there is a data structure that defines it and contains valuable information, called group block descriptor. This data structure helps accessing block groups a...
March 12, 2009
Windows Vista has its own set of improved features and installing it in dual-boot configuration with any Windows older operating system like XP gives the flexibility to use both your new and old software versions. Another main reason is the better performance in the older and less resource hungry op...
March 04, 2009
Your computer hard drive may encounter problems at any point of time irrespective of the operating system and hardware resources you are using. Most of the operating systems provide inbuilt disk repair tools to overcome such problems. For example, Mac includes Disk Utility and fsck to fix these issu...
February 27, 2009
Though Linux is among the safest and the most reliable computer operating systems that are available today and it is designed to provide high stability, but data might also get lost from Linux systems. Data loss is an unforeseen situation that may cause damage to valuable files and settings on any p...
February 21, 2009
Time Machine is the backup utility, introduced with Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). The tool can carry out incremental backups of files on internal as well as external hard drives and hence helps avoiding Mac Data Recovery needs. In order to backup data to external hard drive, it is required that hard driv...
February 18, 2009
Apple Safari is powerful web browser, which comes built-in with Mac OS X 10.2.8 and above. This is a feature rich web browser, which has been built around WebKit open source project. But, some users face a problem while using the web browser, which causes the system to hang. Also, when the web brows...
February 13, 2009
Mac OS X 10.5 or Leopard is a high-featured operating system, developed by Apple. There are few applications in Mac OS X 10.5 which provide services, through which the user can use the features of these applications while working in some other application. Users can open the application´s menu...
February 11, 2009
Linux allows you to have one or more physical volumes on a single machine. Logical volumes can fit completely on physical volumes, even though you never unequivocally create them as adjacent. A logical volume could take part of all physical volumes. Sometimes, due to hardware failure, software malfu...
February 10, 2009
Windows 2000 and later operating systems include a feature called ´Write Behind Caching´. This feature is meant to cache the data to be written and actually write the data when the system is idle. Also termed as delayed writes or lazy writes, if the feature is enabled, then it can help i...
February 07, 2009
UnionFS is a Linux file system service that allows users to have the union mount for other Linux file systems. The union mount is the procedure of mounting several Linux file systems simultaneously. All these mounted file systems would then work as a solitary file system. The function of UnionFS is ...
February 05, 2009
BaseSystem.pkg file is one of the important package files which is created when Mac OS X is installed, used by Panther (Mac OS X v10.3) and Tiger (Mac OS X v10.4) to extract files from and is located in /Library/Receipts folder. The information stored in the Receipts folder is used by Disk Utility t...
February 02, 2009
After an unexpected shutdown, when you try to start your Linux computer, your system may refuse to boot and you might experience some error messages. The error message may sound like the followings:"Your system appears to have shut down uncleanlyPress Y within 4 seconds to force file system integrit...
January 30, 2009
Mac OS X supports HFS series of file systems. At first, comes the HFS, which is referred as the standard one and has been used as the primary file system until Mac 8.1. Then, HFS was replaced by its extended version called HFS plus (HFS+). This file system supports many advanced features, which were...
January 27, 2009
Disk utility advantages Tiger users to resize the partitions, without loss of data. So if you are resizing Mac hard drives, Disk Utility offers you an easy way. But users keep reporting that while doing so, they get some strange error messages which state that there is no enough space on the drive, ...
January 22, 2009
Mac partitions are what we refer as Mac volumes. For partitioning the Mac hard drive, you need to initialize it and carry out the further process, either through Disk Utility or Drive Setup. These utilities perform disk related tasks.After the disk has been partitioned, all the related volume inform...
January 16, 2009
The basic purpose of a computer system is to store, organize and maintain the files. The File System is the key component to achieve this. This is only possible with the help of file system to let the operating system access data in an ordered manner. FAT, NTFS, Ext2, Ext3 and HFS are a few examples...
January 12, 2009
The Operating system is the most essential part of a computer system. Operating system vendors periodically release updates to increase their performance and add new functions. In Ubuntu Linux you can use apt-get for complete up-gradation. Apt-get is a powerful command line utility, which is used to...
January 06, 2009
Because Mac OS X is a complete and sophisticated operating system, the problems faced by the users could be equally complex. A Mac system generally crashes with the system error, either at startup or while running.
Instead of showing error codes, the Mac translated the error code to appropriate ...
January 03, 2009
Despite the hard disk recovery awareness being spread, the common misbelieve that the process only constitutes replacing the damaged parts is still covering the users´ minds. Believe me, if it were that easy, then no company would have cost a high price. Hard disk recovery technology is always...
December 29, 2008
Outlook users may frequently found themselves around a confusing question-Smaller PST Files or A Single Large PST? So let´s try to solve it here.Actually, by default, MS Outlook has a single file called PST, which stores all the incoming and outgoing e-mails, calendar, appointments, tasks and ...
December 22, 2008
Data loss is the worst scenario for a computer user which could occur at anytime. It could be due to accidental deletion, hard drive formatting, virus attack, natural disaster, head crash, file system corruption and the like. Let´s go through some data recovery suggestions, which may help you ...
December 24, 2008
There are some situations in Linux operating system where you can not mount the file system and logical volumes to access data from it. It specifically occurs in dual boot systems. When you attempt to repair the file system on your root partition, the process gets failed. In such situations, you sys...
December 16, 2008
Data is organized in the form of files. Your system recognizes files of different applications, each one having a diverse rating of importance. In an organization, not a single person but all the employees are equally responsible for preventing files. Hence each one of them should be educated enough...
December 18, 2008
The phrase ´back-end database´ is very common among the developers who use small database management systems, which could contain end-user application programming in the database as single item. The most common database application used as back-end database is Microsoft Access. The back ...
December 12, 2008
Slow performance and delays in responses is common complain among Outlook users. Apart from Add-Ins issues, poorly configured Outlook, hard disk problems and insufficient RAM, large size of PST is the main factor which makes Outlook slow. Outlook 2002 and its earlier version impart a restriction tha...
December 10, 2008
Due to many numbers of reasons, user may want to use his/her Outlook PST data in Outlook Express and for which import messages is the option. Using File->Import->Messages->Microsoft Outlook, user may succeed in its intentions, until no difficulty is there. But, in case of process failure, t...
December 06, 2008
When the worst scenario of data loss takes place in your computer system and all of your important and business critical data files disappear, do not worry at all. There are several data recovery software available in the market to help you out. You can recover your significant data very easily and ...
December 02, 2008
Dirty shutdowns, minor file system inconsistencies and more, these are the common problems with Linux operating system. So at each boot, the criterion of fsck is meant for preventing the data loss problems with Linux. But contrarily, serious data loss issues have been seen, when the user loses power...
December 04, 2008
Kernel panic in Linux operating systems is the condition where system detects an error, out its scope. When the unrecoverable state is detected by Linux, the kernel code can possibly call the panic function of sys/system.h and in turn may yield you error messages, similar to:"Linux Kernel panic: VFS...
November 29, 2008
When it comes to the performance of raw database, the biggest performance gaining mechanism could be the use of indexes. Database indexes improve access to your stored data, so you do not have to scan whole table for accessing your data. Indexing saves a lot of CPU, memory and I/O usage. Though, it ...
November 27, 2008
With Bug 53102 in your Linux system, you may find a number of problems got attached to your system:The system won´t unmountSystem freezes sometimesFrequent Partition corruptionDisk is remounted as read-onlyThese problems generally occur with Ext3 file system. Moreover, the users also report to...
November 24, 2008
Linux file systems such as Ext2, Ext3 and Reiser FS file systems do the same organizing stuff for the files and directories, which the other file systems are expected to do. But, if one day you find symptoms like cross linked files, lost clusters or the invalid files and directories, these give you ...