Disk image files
Why you should create a disk image?
When you face external drive failure and are going to recover data,
a very important step is creating a disk image file – sector-by-sector copy of the original disk.
Let’s discuss why it is important.
Let’s imagine a situation where your external disk has many bad sectors and you cannot access data stored on it.
If you try to use such a disk in data recovery,
there is a chance to get more bad sectors resulting in less data recovered in the best case,
or no data at all in the worst case. The same is true for other disk malfunctions.
How to create a disk image file
To create a disk image file you need to use special software. Most data recovery tools allow to create disk image files. Below you can find the detailed instructions on how to create disk images in ReclaiMe File Recovery:
- Download and install ReclaiMe File Recovery
- In the ReclaiMe window showing disks and partitions,
select the external drive you need to image and click the arrow near to the Disks button.
- Click Create Disk image file.
- Save the image file of the external hard drive to another storage device.
Note that you should think in advance about a storage you will use for the disk image.
The prepared storage shouldn’t be smaller than the external disk in question.
Usually, you can take some other external disk for this operation.
You can put the original disk aside and work only with the disk image file.
Note that the disk image created by ReclaiMe is not bound exclusively to ReclaiMe — you can load it to any data recovery program capable of working with disk image files.
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