May 03 2011

Linux file recovery software to avert critical data loss

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Linux has gained enough popularity for its new and updated features. Usually, this operating system is considered as the most regularly upgraded application and hence, with Linux, many users feel that they are having the advantage of using the most recent technologies. Even some feel that Linux is free from virus attack and other data loss problems. However, it is the fact that the technology has nothing to do with data loss. Linux systems also undergo severe data loss situations, leaving the system drive completely inaccessible. Under such cases, you can take the help of any Linux data recovery software to retrieve your data back.

Data loss in Linux can be in any form, starting from the accidental/intentional deletion, formatting of the media, virus/malware attack, operating system malfunction, file system corruption or any other software/hardware contradiction etc.

Whatever, be the reason behind the failure of the Linux system, it is your valuable data in the media which suffers the most. Some data can be urgently required, some are the result of months of research work and some even can never be recreated. In such situations, loss of them caused severe business loss and mental trauma.

Among all the odds, if you have taken regular backups of your data, you always resides at the safe side and can restore the data from a recently taken valid backup. But, if you have not taken any recent backup, you are under serious trouble for sure.

But, among all these troubles of data loss, the good fact is that data from the troubled Linux drive never gets lost permanently. Therefore, if you can take strict measures to avoid overwriting the data in the drive, and run any efficient Linux file recovery utility, then, all you lost data can be easily recovered back.

These undelete Linux applications can work on any Linux operating system based computer system and can recover your lost, deleted, formatted or inaccessible data effectively. These utilities have been developed with many advanced scanning algorithms to dig into the storage media throughly and are completely read-only in nature. Moreover, with detailed instructions at every step and highly graphical user interfaces, they are pretty easy to use even with much technical knowledge.

April 21 2011

Linux Vs Windows Web Hosting?

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Linux web hosting (often referred to as LAMP – Linux, Apache, MySQL & PHP) solutions are suitable for webmasters who use Linux hosting features, such as Perl programming, PHP programming and MySQL database.

Windows Web Hosting gives a company the capability of designing web sites using the ever-popular Windows Operating System. This allows development using technologies such as Active Server Pages (ASP), COM, and the newer .NET infrastructure.

Advantages of using Linux based web server compared to Windows based web server:-

1.Stable:-
Linux operating system is very stable and robust.  A web site hosted on a Linux operating system will have very high up-time.

2. Low cost of ownership:-
Linux OS comes free of cost.  Also, it has fully fledged server, and desk top applications that come free with the OS. These server applications (such as FTP, Web Server, DNS Server, File Server etc.) are also very stable.

3. Easy to move between hosts:
A web site designed to host on a Linux based web server can be hosted on a Windows web server easily, where as the reverse is not always true.

4. Most widely used : Linux/Unix based web hosting is most widely used compared to Windows based web hosting.

5. Scalability: A web site designed for compatibility with a Linux/Unix based web server meets the scalability requirement easily without making any site wide design changes.

Disadvantage:-
Linux based web server is not fully compatible with Microsoft technologies. If you are using any specialized applications or VB for development of your web site, it is preferable to host with a Windows based web server.

Both these web server are used by users for different purposes and the selection of the web hosting depends upon the nature of the website or business. Linux server administration and Linux server management has been more effective for complex websites, where as Windows servers are used for sites which needs different configuration.

April 19 2011

Corruption of Fstab and Mtab Files and Available Linux Recovery Solutions

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However advanced the technology may be and whatever precautions we may take, data loss is almost inevitable. Though Linux operating system is often improved upon its previous versions than any of its counterparts, still there are a number of reasons, for which data can be lost in a Linux operating system based computer. In a Linux computer, the fstab (/etc/fstab) and mtab (/etc/fstab) are the two most crucial directories. Without these directories, the operating system could not be able to locate neither the existing hard drive volumes nor the mounted drives on your system. For this reason, the system fails to boot and all your data in the hard drive becomes inaccessible. In such situation of data loss, you need any Linux data recovery software to recover back the lost or inaccessible data.

Facts about ‘fstab’ and ‘mtab’ directories:

• The fstab or ‘file systems table’ is a system directory within the Linux operating system. This system configuration file contains information about all the available hard drives and volumes attached to the system. The file tells, the way, hard drive volumes are initialized and integrated through the file system. Moreover, it lists the details of the file systems, which are accessed by the ‘fsck command.

• The mtab or ‘mounted file systems table’ is also part of system configuration and lists all the currently mounted file systems on your Linux system. The file retains every detail of the mounted volumes, that is whether mounted manually or automatically and is automatically updated once the mount command is triggered against any drive or volume.

Sometimes, while accessing the Linux drives or the mounted volumes you may come across error messages related to the mounted file system and all the files and directories become inaccessible. The error message that you may have encountered can be read as below:

“Cannot read table of mounted file systems”

The above error is caused due to the corruption of ‘fstab’ or ‘mtab’ directories. Thus, the file system fails to mount and the data remains inaccessible thereof.

Such situation of data loss can only be dealt by any efficient Linux data recovery utility. These applications are meant to recover the lost, deleted, formatted or inaccessible data from the Linux file system based volumes. Moreover, these helpful utilities are completely safe to use and come with detailed instructions, so that can be used without any prior knowledge.

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April 16 2011

Solution to Disk Label Corruption in LINUX

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The LINUX operating system is very much similar to UNIX and has derived many basic design principles from it. Day by day, LINUX OS has improved upon its previous versions and indeed has incorporated a number of distinguishable features over other operating systems. In LINUX, disk drives are mounted through file system volume label and not the device path. This is a newer concept applied in LINIX in order to avoid the ambiguity in distinguishing after a disk has been removed and some other have been inserted with the same device path. However, if there is corruption to the volume label, the situation becomes more complex, keeping the data from the drive completely inaccessible and a LINUX data recovery utility is a must to recover the inaccessible data.

To be a bit more elaborative, suppose, your system disk is at /dev/sda2. The system may have mapped another disk as /dev/sda2 and hence, your fstab, where all entries of the mounted disks are there, will be messed up making your system start improperly. At times, such issues can cause huge loss of data.

These kinds of situation may fire the command fsck automatically to check the LINUX volumes each time the system boots-up. As fsck, checks for file system errors and tries to repair the same, it may take a significant amount of time. Any power surge or system crash during the process may cause serious system instability and data loss. This is an added problem that may further flash a warning message and further increase the chances that your LINUX volumes become inaccessible. The message may read as below:

“Warning: invalid flag 0×0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by w(rite)”

The warning message tells that the disk label has been corrupted and that is why the data in the drive is inaccessible. If running Disk Utility or fsck command fails, you have to restore the data from the backup. However, if backup of your data is not available, run a reliable Linux disk recovery software to recover the data.

LINUX data recovery software are designed with powerful scanning algorithms that can recover any deleted, formatted or inaccessible data with ease irrespective of the data loss situation.

Among many names, Stellar Phoenix Linux Data Recovery is tried and appreciated by many users. The application can successfully recover your lost, formatted or inaccessible data from FAT32,FAT16,FAT12,Ext3,Ext4,Ext2 file system based LINUX volumes.

Kuldeep a techno geek is a technical writer doing research on different file system in linux like Ext2, Ext3. And Ext4. He is also interested in linux data recovery, And Ext3 recovery. He is currently working with http://www.data-recovery-linux.com/

April 13 2011

What to do when data loss occurs in Linux due to corrupt File Descriptors

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In a Linux operating system based computer, directories, blocks, sockets, files, and other items are referred by their corresponding file descriptors. File descriptor is one of the significant data structures of Linux operating system. It is very essential for the file descriptor to be consistent for proper working of your system. In case it is damaged, you can not access your precious data from the disk and face severe data loss situations. In such cases, you need to opt for Linux data recovery solutions.

If you encounter any error from your system related to file descriptor corruption, it can be due to corruption to the Linux file system. File system corruption is a major reason of data loss and cause serious problems for you. For a practical instance of this problem with your Linux system, you may encounter the following error message when you attempt to access data from your Linux hard drive-

“Bad file descriptor”

The above error may also occur while booting your system or mounting a hard drive volume. It renders your precious data inaccessible. At this point, you need to find out the root of this problem and fix it using Linux recovery solutions.

Grounds of the problem-
You may encounter this behavior of Linux operating system due to any of the following reasons-

Linux uses /dev/null file that removes all data, which is written to the file after reporting that write process is completed successfully. You might encounter the file description problems if the file is deleted.
If this error occurs while accessing any file from the hard drive, it can be due to corrupt disk blocks or file system corruption.

Resolution
Try using the below methods to sort out this issue-
To fix overwritten or deleted /dev/null file problems, you are required to replace the file with suitable iNode.Run fsck command on the affected Linux hard drive to resolve file system inconsistency and hard drive integrity issues. Before you run this command, file system must be un-mounted and system must be running in single-user mode.

Restore data from the most recent backup. It is an efficient Ext3 recovery solution to get your precious data back.If none of the above methods work, use third-party Linux recovery software to perform data recovery Linux. The applications are capable of retrieving your significant data in all data loss situations.

March 30 2011

Recovering a Red Hat Linux System After a Power Outage

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Today, the Linux operating system has carved a niche of its own. It has got a dedicated category of users who will happily pay for it if it ever comes with a price tag. The Linux system is secure, reliable, fast, and does not require hardware/software drivers to install them on the system. Having said that, even such a robust operating system can face corruption. Corruption can occur due to various reasons such as power outages, corrupt file system, human errors, damaged operating system, etc. In such cases, you should try performing appropriate corrective measures to sort out the issue. However, if you are unable to do so then you should use a third-party Linux data recovery software to perform Linux recovery.

Consider a scenario wherein you are working on a Red Hat Linux system. Suddenly, there is a power outage and the system shuts down unexpectedly. When you try to switch on the system, you fail to do so.

Cause:
The cause of this situation is that the Linux system has corrupted because of power outage.

Resolution:
If the problem is because of having a faulty hardware like bad hard drive or memory chip, the file system check may not be sufficient to resolve this problem. This happens particularly when the file system is corrupted. In such cases, the Red Hat boot process will produce an error message and guide you into a shell so that you can perform the file system repair yourself.

When the recovery shell dismounts all the file systems to mount the root file system in a read-only mode, you can perform full checks on it. To do this, you should run the e2fsck utility on the corrupted file system that will be able to resolve all the inconsistencies. Exit the shell and restart the system. The system will function normally now.

However, if you still are unable to recover the system then you should use a third-party Linux data recovery software to do the needful. Such read-only tools are able to recover the data safely without overwriting the existing data.

Stellar Phoenix Linux Data Recovery is a Linux recovery software that enables you to recover data from the corrupted Linux systems. It is supported by various Linux distributions such as Red Hat, SUSE, Debian, Caldera, Mandrake, Sorcerer, TurboLinux, Slackware, Gentoo, etc. This Linux data recovery software is able to perform ext2 recovery, ext3 recovery, and ext4 recovery. In addition, it can recover data from FAT12, FAT16, FAT32 file systems as well. This Linux recovery software is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, Server 2003, XP, and 2000.

March 18 2011

Running Linux And Playing Computer Games – Is It Possible?

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One huge question that many people have about the Linux operating system is how well it can handle games.  There are many who use their computer more for gaming than for other purposes, so gaming is important.  Can Linux play games?

Any game that is based on the browser alone will work fine in Linux.  For browser based games like Farmville, these will all work in browsers as long as there are the Flash and Java plugins.  These work the same in Linux as on any other operating system.

The second type of gaming is open source games.  There are quite a few free games that are made for Linux as well as other operating systems.  Since these are open source, it’s easy for programmers to port various versions of the game for the different operating system choices that exist.

What about commercial Windows games?
Not every single Windows game will work with Linux, but many of the popular ones will.  The first issue is if you have Linux compatible hardware on your system.  If your video card works well with Linux, then you won’t have to worry about performance issues that some meet by not having proper drivers to run advanced 3D graphics.

You can run quite a few games through WineHQ.  This is an application that can run Windows software.  Not everything works, but you can check the site to see which ones do work.

Another option is to use some of the paid programs that will correctly install and run Windows games on your Linux system.  Many don’t want to have to pay for something, but these services do work and have support for many of the more popular games.

For older games, generally you can use applications like DosBox or ScummVM that will emulate the environment the game needs to run in.