Anyway, there is something you CAN do; if you are having data access problems and your media has no symptoms of physical failure or damage, try and check some obvious issues before deciding if you need data recovery:

- Are power and disk cables properly connected? - Is configuration or disk information correct? - Try defective unit with a different adapter/controller interface or on a different computer. - Is there an experienced technician at a local store or company help desk that you can consult, if these steps are beyond your capabilities? (Make sure whoever is in contact with your data loss situation is fully aware that they should do nothing during their troubleshooting that will risk hurting your data.)

Doesn't work? Don't panic; if damage occurred to drive's electronics, it most likely could be fixed. If damage occurred to the, for example, system areas of disk, leaving data zone intact, those data could be theoretically, and (in some cases) practically, recovered by a professional.

Look on Net for data recovery companies, ask them questions, explain them your situation. In most cases they will be able to understand your problem and fix it for a fair price.

One binary data (that can be a 1 or a 0) is called a “bit”. For example a data “1001” is a 4 bit data. Where first bit is 1, second bit is 0, third bit is another 0 and fourth bit is 1.

Bit is computer terminology for “chunk”.

How instructions can be represented by bits?

One bit data can only represent 1 out of 2 possible states – either 1 or 0. Which in real world can be used to represent things such as on or off, high or low, black or white – any 2 states condition?

If we increase instruction size to 2 bits, then we can represent 4 instructions – 00, or 01, or 10 or 11. If we increase size to 3 bits then we can represent 8 possible instructions – 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110 and 111

If you notice trend from above examples is that maximum possible number of instructions is power of 2 of bit size. That is 2 bits can represent maximum of 2^2 (which is 4) instructions, and 3 bits can represent maximum of 2^3 (which is 2x2x2 = 8) instructions.

So 8 bits data can represent maximum of 2^8 (2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2 = 256) instructions (or states) and 32 bits data can represent 2^32 (4,294,967,296) instructions.

You can actually read a program stream contents using certain editor – normally called HEX editor. Using these special text editors you can look at instructions in binary, hexadecimal, octal, and decimal format.

I’ll cover details of what each of above format (hex, oct and dec) means in other article.

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