Data recovery: how to recover from a hard drive failure
Context:
Unfortunately, most home users and many business users do not back up their systems. Also, many small businesses have older backup procedures that are often ineffective at recovering files.
Sure, you can go to your neighborhood electronics store and buy a replacement drive for your computer, but what about your data on the failing hard drive? How important was it? Did you save it or back it up?
To do:
If you need to recover data on the hard drive, the first thing you should do is avoid trying to reboot or do anything that involves the drive. Doing so can actually do more damage to your data.
The only irreversible data loss is caused by overwriting bits, physical damage to the drive’s platters, or destruction of the platters’ magnetization, which rarely happens in the real world. In most cases, the malfunction is caused by a damaged circuit board, the failure of a mechanical component, and the failure of the internal software system track or firmware.
In the event of an actual hard drive failure, only a data recovery professional can recover your data. And just because you can’t access your data through your operating system doesn’t necessarily mean your data is lost.
As a “rule of thumb”, if you hear a click emitted from your hard drive, or if the computer’s SMART function indicates an error during the boot process, something is wrong. You should stop using the hard drive immediately to avoid causing further damage and potentially rendering the data on the hard drive unrecoverable.
After receiving your failed hard drive, a data recovery specialist’s first step will be to attempt to save an image of the damaged drive to another drive. This image drive, not the actual damaged drive, is where the data recovery specialist will attempt to recover your lost data.
The next step in the imaging process is to determine if the hard drive failure was an actual malfunction, system corruption, or a system tracking problem.
System corruption and system tracking issues are usually fixed using specialist data recovery software. System corruption or system trace recoveries do not require processing in a clean room environment.
Conclusion:
Unfortunately, damage to a drive’s circuit board or failure of primary drives is not uncommon. In each of these failures, a data recovery specialist must work on the system only in a clean room environment. There, the specialist can replace parts such as drive electronics, internal components, read/write arms, read/write heads, spindle motors, or spindle bearings from a donor drive in order to gain access to the data from faulty hard drive. In most cases, the data recovery specialist can recover and return the lost data.