Data recovery mechanics, is it possible to recover items from the hard drive?

Question

I've been using some data recovery tools like Diskinternals Uneraser. I've been wondering how we can recover things on a hard drive programmatically?

Is there specific disc access mechanics, patterns, API to use? Is it something I can do in C#?

Answer 1

As soon as you have arcane knowledge of file system internals and direct access to the hardware, you will be able to recover things on a hard drive, even in C#.

Speaking for NTFS, there is no "deleted items" API, AFAIK. Besides from "Deleted Items", that is. ;-)

Answer 2

Here's something. Scroll down to "Physical disk and volumes"

Answer 3

There is a nice tool, PhotoRec, available for Linux and Windows, that can recover deleted files regardless of the filesystem they were located on. It's open source, so you can find out what APIs it uses.