How to Use the Recover Command in Windows for Recovering Files

The "recover" command extracts intact portions of a file from a corrupted disk partition.

Every Windows users dreads the day when his computer's disk utilities locate bad sectors and corrupted data. Sometimes you may lose access to a single file that becomes corrupted when some of its data is lost due to bad sectors, but other portions of the file remain intact. In such cases you can use the Windows "recover" command to extract the portion of the file that hasn't been lost to bad disk sectors.

Instructions

1. Click the Windows orb.

2. Type "command" in the search box and press "Enter" to open a Command Prompt window.

3. Type "recover" at the command prompt, followed by the drive, full path name, and full exact file name of the file to be recovered. For example, to recover the file "Example.doc" from the "Files" directory on drive "C:" you would type "recover c:\Files\Example.doc."

4. Press the "Enter" key to execute the recover command. Recover will extract all available file information from good disk sectors and will leave all information contained on bad sectors blank.

Tips & Warnings

• Determine the drive, directory name, and file name of the file that you wish to restore before using the recover command. You must know the exact file name and path to the file to use recover; wildcards such as "*" and "?" won't work.

References

• Microsoft: Recover