Damaged Catalog Files Cause Data Loss In Microsoft Windows 2003

Together with releasing new versions of the Windows operating system, Microsoft also offers a stream of software updates to make improve your computing experience. These updates generally include hotfixes and security updates. They make your system more secure and error free. But in some cases, where the update may fail, your system might not work properly. Sometimes, it refuses to boot up and you can not get into it. This behavior of Microsoft Windows renders all your valuable data inaccessible and leads to critical data loss situations. In order to recover lost data in such circumstances, windows data recovery solutions are required.

As a practical example, you might come across below given error message when you attempt to apply a security update or a hotfix in MS Windows 2003 Server:

�The data is invalid.�

In this situation, you could not complete applying the security update or hotfix. At this point, you need to find out the cause of this issue and resolve it by performing Windows Recovery to retrieve lost, missing or inaccessible data from Windows hard drive.

Grounds of the issue

This problem might take place if your system has a corrupted .cat (catalog file). When Update.exe utility, which you use for applying security update or hotfix start, it verifies digital signatures of all .cat files. When Update.exe encounters a damaged .cat file, you get above error message. The .cat file is a binary file, which shows the sate of all packages and settings in Microsoft Windows.

This problem might also take place when you download update package from Windows Update website and your system doesn't have Internet connection available when update package is applied.

Solution

To sort out this problem, follow below steps:

Verify that you have Internet connection available, while applying update.

Determine the number of damaged catalog files and remove unsigned catalog files from Catroot folder.

Restart your Windows computer.

If this method can not help you to fix the issue, format the hard drive and reinstall operating systems. This method works in most of the cases, but it also removes all of the data from hard drive and require Windows Partition Recovery to be resolved.

Recovery is potential through advanced windows data recovery software. Extensive scanning techniques of these applications ensure perfect recovery in most of the data loss situations. The applications always perform quick, safe and easy recovery.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is a powerful tool to ensure absolute recovery in most of the data loss situations. It works well with Windows 7, Vista, 2003, XP and 2000. The software recovers data from FAT32, VFAT, NTFS and NTFS5 file system partitions.