Hard Drive Data Recovery Scenarios
There’s sweat running down your forehead. Your hard drive is unresponsive and you can’t retrieve that file you have been working on for weeks. All hope seems lost … but is it? Chances actually are good that you can recover that file given the proper diagnosis and early action.
When a hard drive goes bad, there can be several reasons for it doing so. First, the circuitry on the drive itself could have become faulty due to a power surge or static shock. In this instance, a data recovery specialist can put the platters into another drive of the same model as yours and recover your data. It is important that you have a data recovery service perform this work instead of attempting it yourself. This type of work needs to be performed in a clean room, so that any floating dust particles do not settle on your drive platters and scratch its surface.
Another way a hard drive can fail is when there is a mechanical problem with the drive, such as when the hard drive arm fails. You can usually know if this problem is the culprit, since your drive will make a “clicking” noise when the computer attempts to use it. It is imperative that you stop using your computer immediately with this type of problem. The faulty mechanics could cause the arm to scratch your platters’ surface and greatly reduce the chances of successfully recovering your data.
A third scenario in which your hard drive could be bad is if the platters themselves have been damaged. A faulty drive arm as mentioned above usually causes this. This type of problem is the toughest type for data recovery specialists to solve. In this case, the data may have literally been scraped from the surface and no longer exist.
A software program writing to the wrong area of the disk can also corrupt a hard drive. For most programs, the operating system governs how data is physically written to disk. But for specialized programs such as disk defragmentors or partitioning software, they have much more direct access to the drive. A bug in the software or a power outage during a disk defragmenting or repartitioning operation could set up the scenario where the data is stored incorrectly. You should consider consulting a data recovery specialist before retrying the operation that caused the problem.
Lastly, if you have just accidentally deleted a file, and you know your hard drive is otherwise fine, you may be able to do the hard drive data recovery yourself. When a file is deleted, all that essentially happens is that the entry in your computer’s list of files is removed. The contents of the file itself are still physically present on the hard drive. So it is possible for off-the-shelf software to discover where its contents still are. R-Undelete and Active@ Undelete are two good options for data recovery software. It is important in this scenario as well that you quickly stop using your computer for other purposes before performing the data undelete. You do not want your computer to reuse the your file’s space to store something else before you’ve had a chance to do the data file recovery.
Whatever your drive’s illness, a proper diagnosis and treatment is critical. Spend time researching data recovery specialists. Ask how long they have been in business and what their success rate has been. You will also want to understand what their rates are to gauge whether the cost of the hard drive data recovery service will exceed the value of the data you’re trying to rescue.