Product Specifications for CnW Recovery Software

CnW Recovery software is a program designed to run on a PC under Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 2000. A suitable setup will be most PCs up to a few years old with 512MB of RAM, though 1GB prefered. USB V2.0 ports are optional, but do provide a very significant increase in performance over USB V1.1

It will recover data from Hard drives, CDs, DVDs, Flash memory and camera chips, as well as Jaz and Zip drives.

The software is written using Microsoft VC++ which ensures good compatibility with all current versions of Windows operating systems.

The prime function of CnW Recovery software is to recover and restore files from corrupted, or damaged media. It is intended to be easy to use, though with data recovery, some degree of skill is useful as media can fail in any number of ways, and some understanding of possible recovery processes is always useful. Recovery though is performed with many forensic features enabled as well, so full logging and reports can be produced when the Forensic Option has been purchased.

In theory there should be no limit on the size of disk being recovered, and there should be no limit on the number of files. To assist with this, 1GB of RAM is desirable, and it is often best to restore files onto a clean, separate hard drive, larger than the one being recovered.

File size and NTFS compression

When recovering files, the new hard drive may be setup to have NTFS compression enabled. At times this will assist in putting a quart in the pint bottle. There is occasionally a problem with this. There appears to be a limit (due to XP, Win2000) with the maximum size of file that can be written compressed. This size is dependent on the amount of operating system RAM, and if exceeded will display an error message indicating ‘Delayed write failure’ On Windows NT, with 64MB of RAM, this limit was about 11GB. With XP, and 1GB or RAM, the limit seems to be any file of about 70GB.

For other files, such as CnW recovery log files, enabling compression can be extremely beneficial. The files can become large when the disk being recovered contains many files, but the operating system compression will reduce the file size to between 10 and 20% of the original size.