If you have to retrieve an erased file from the hard drive or a flash memory card, what should you do? It is safer to write the retrieved file to another disk. If the file size is small, you can use a floppy disk. Otherwise, you may write the file to a different drive letter on the same hard drive. You can perform this task using Norton Disk Editor. Norton Disk Editor is part of the Norton Utilities and Norton SystemWorks that could be used to retrieve lost data.

Disk Editor is a command prompt program designed primarily to access FAT-based file system such as FAT12 (floppy disk), FAT 16 (MS-DOS), and FAT 32 (Windows 98). If the Windows NT, Windows 2000, or Windows XP is installed on a FAT32 partition or hard drive, you can use Disk Editor to carry out data recovery task. Only when Disk Editor is running in physical sector mode, it is able to work on NTFS volumes. If you want to get back data from a hard drive and copy the data to another location, you must set Disk Editor to default Read-Only mode to avoid making any unintentional modifications to the hard disk.

The location of the file is determined using following process:

1. Figure out the cluster (allocation unit) size of the drive on which the file is located.
2. To find out the name of the removed file and determine which clusters that contain the file data, you need to run the Disk Editor.

It is not required to restore the filename since it will be restored to another drive. Since the cluster would be copied to another file, it would be a good idea to look at the cluster and make sure that they contain the required data. You need to use the Norton Disk Editor to look at the starting and ending clusters of the file before you try to recover it. This is especially important if you want to recover files from formatted drive.

The sectors that have the file should be specified if you wish to copy the contents of clusters to a file safely. The sector number and the cluster number would be shown in Disk Editor.

You can get non command prompt data recovery program such as REMO Recover. The software comes with user-friendly and slick interface. Remo recover is a powerful recovery software that uses effective scanning algorithms for data recovery. The software contains components which allow you to recover files from formatted drive. You are able to also use it to recover files from USB drive and recover files from SD card.