Posts Tagged ‘Hard Drive Recovery’

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Do-It-Yourself Diagnostic Tips for Hard Drive Recovery

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

Lison Joseph is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the popular tool for personal online backup — Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/do-it-yourself-diagnostic-tips-for-hard-drive-recovery.html

Read on if Hard Drive Recovery sets you sweating!

The first thing that you should know about hard drive recovery is that not all hard disk crashes are fatal and in most cases, recovery of data is possible with fairly good data accuracy rates. However, you will be able to decide on recovery options only if you know what exactly is wrong with the disk.

So, if ever you are that unfortunate computer user to face a hard drive recovery scenario, here are a few tips that might come in handy before you start knocking on the doors of a hard drive recovery expert.

There are a few things you can do which would give you a fair idea about the nature of the hard disk problem and more importantly, these will put you in a position to bargain with the data recovery expert, if you are forced to go to him!

Get into the hard drive recovery expert’s shoes!

Ask yourself what is the problem. It could be a logical problem, meaning there is something wrong with the boot sector of the hard drive rendering it un-bootable. In worse scenarios, it could be an electrical problem where the circuit board on the hard disk has been damaged due to a higher than allowed electrical current passing through it. In the worst scenario, it could be a physical problem where the head that reads the data stored on the different platters arranged inside a hard drive has been damaged or the alignment of the platters themselves could have been affected.

Depending on whether it is a logical, electrical or mechanical problem, you will be able to make a realistic assessment about the success chances of a paid hard drive recovery effort.

Do these yourself before you go begging to a hard drive recovery expert

Boot from a floppy and do a read only scan of the disk. This would tell you if it is a logical error. Therefore, you will be able to decide on an appropriate strategy for fixing the master boot record. If the boot sector is lost then you should be able to decide how to go about recovering the data. If there are bad sectors in the master boot record, then attach the hard drive to another working computer as a secondary hard drive and try to recover data using data recovery software.

Open up your system’s ATX cabinet box, take out your hard drive, and closely examine the circuit board under the hard drive. Do not touch the board as static discharge can damage the disk’s head. If there are tell-tale signs of a burnt circuit board or burnt components, then you can decide for sure that its a board problem. Now that you know its a board problem, you must consult your hardware supplier or service agent to decide what to do about it.

The sure sign of a mechanical problem is the clicking sound that you will hear from the hard drive when it is trying to spin up or spin down. If this click sound is coming, then the problem is related to mechanical trouble inside the hard disk platter assembly. This, more often than not is beyond repair. If a hard drive recovery expert claims it can be repaired, then make sure that is a “no data, no pay” agreement!

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Initial Steps in Hard Drive Recovery

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Andrew Whitehead is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the popular Amazon S3 based tool for online file backup — Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/initial-steps-in-hard-drive-recovery.html

First Steps in Hard Drive Recovery

If you find that your hard drive is no longer functioning, remember that a hard drive recovery is nearly always possible, so there is no need for panic. Data loss is not unusual and in nearly all cases the data can be recovered. Only in severe severe cases involving platter damage, magnetic degradation, or over-write of a file will the data be practically unrecoverable, and even in these cases a hard drive recovery by MFM photography may be possible if the data is valuable enough to justify huge expense.

Having said that, there are steps you can take to minimize further data loss and greatly increase your chances of successful hard drive recovery

Initial Steps in Hard Drive Recovery after a ‘crash’

If you find that you are unable to boot to the operating system, and you can no longer see the hard drive in the BIOS, there is a strong possibility that your hard drive has crashed. In this case you should shut the whole system down immediately. If there is some physical problem with the hard drive, it will be made a lot worse if you run power through the hard drive attempting to reboot the system.

If the head stack inside your drive is damaged, trying to run it will cause additional damage to the surfaces of the platters in your hard drive, and this is where the data you are wanting to recover is stored.

Initial Steps in Hard Drive Recovery after Corruption

If you have accidentally reformatted your hard drive, or accidentally deleted a file or folder, once again you must not write any new information onto your drive. The files you have deleted are still intact somewhere on the drive. Deleting a file simply means removing the location tag for that file, allowing that area of the drive to be over-written. If you add any new data it is possible that it will over-write your lost data effectively losing it forever.

If you believe a partition has become corrupted on your hard drive, it is very important not to try and re-install your operating system or add any new data to the drive.

If you have accidentally deleted a partition, attempting to restore it by formatting the drive will not recover your data, it will only result in the addition of an empty partition.

If you experience a single file corruption, any attempt to create a new file with the same name will partially over-write the file, greatly decreasing your chances of a full recovery.

This is just a short selection of the more common reasons for losing data from your hard drive, and illustrates that some attempts made by you, or even an IT technician, to recover a file or drive could decrease the chances of subsequent professional recovery efforts, or even make a successful recovery impossible. If you have any doubts about what action to take, just ask yourself this question: “Am I prepared to lose that data? “.

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Always Keep a Boot Floppy Handy for Hard Drive Recovery

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

Lison Joseph is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the best online backup tool — Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/always-keep-a-boot-floppy-handy-for-hard-drive-recovery.html

Expect the unexpected, as far as hard drive recovery is concerned

Well you have absolutely no idea when you might need a hard drive recovery because of a belligerent hard disk going south on you! One fine morning when you boot up, your BIOS might just refuse to detect the hard drive. These things happen for no apparent reason and the only thing you as a computer user can do is to be prepared. This does not mean that all users should prepare against all the permutations and combination of ways in which their system can hang up.

However, there are a few basic things that every user can and ideally should do. One such is to have a clean bootable floppy ready, always.

Bootable floppy in the context of hard drive recovery

Well, In the first place, if you do not know what a bootable floppy is, then it is high time you learnt more about what is the process of booting and what are the different ways in which it can be done. For starters, booting is the process of detecting all the hardware and loading all the required operating system files when the computer is first powered up.

There are several ways of booting, like from the hard drive (as is usually done) or from a CD or even from a floppy drive. Booting from devices other than a hard drive is usually necessitated by a non-functioning primary boot device (read hard drive). So a bootable floppy is the first thing you are going to need if you want to get into your system and take a peek at the hard disk to determine what is ailing your storage device and then decide on your hard drive recovery strategy.

You might be wondering how a system knows where to boot from when the power is switched on. It is here, the BIOS comes into picture. The BIOS has information about boot procedure and you can manually configure this to set a boot procedure of your choice. For example, you can set it first, seek the hard drive and if it fails, then try to boot from the CD drive and if that too fails, then seek the floppy drive. So even to start contemplating hard drive recovery, you should be comfortable finding your way around various SETUP options in BIOS.

So how do you make a bootable floppy, the first step towards hard drive recovery!

Frankly, it is quite simple. In most windows versions you can do a search in Windows Help with string, “boot floppy” or “startup disk” and you will get the exact procedure for making an MS DOS start up disk. If you are well versed with DOS, then all you need to do is insert the floppy disk and use the format command on the floppy drive. Do not forget to use the “/s” switch so that the required system files are copied after a quick format.

Now that you have a boot floppy is ready, you are better prepared to face a hard drive recovery scenario!

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How is a Hard Drive Recovery Done?

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Andrew Whitehead is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the popular Amazon S3 based online backup service — Back2zip. This article available at http://free-backup.info/how-is-a-hard-drive-recovery-done.html

How a Hard Drive Recovery is Done

When your hard drive is ruined, the obvious question to ask is, “how do you get my data back? ” Despite what data recovery businesses may tell you, it is not done by black magic nor is it anything approaching rocket science, it has more to do with having the right equipment, and enough knowledge to know what to do with it.

Logical Hard Drive Recovery

Generally speaking, the first thing a hard drive recovery business will do when they receive a hard drive is to evaluate it to determine what recovery method will be required.

If the drive failure is a software problem, they will perform a scan of the drive to try and repair the file system. In some cases a partition can be repaired, restoring the hard drive to its status prior to the drive failure. If this cannot be done, they will do a very low-level scan, searching every sector of the hard drive for files. Once they have located a lost file, it will be copied onto the media of your choice, this is usually a CD-ROM, a DVD-ROM, or ideally onto another hard drive.

This type of Logical hard drive recovery takes a great deal of time, particularly if the hard drive is close to physical failure. It is not unusual for scanning to take a whole day, and recovering any files that are found to take another.

Physical Hard Drive Recovery

If your hard drive is suffering from a physical failure, the recovery method is considerably more difficult. There are two discrete forms of physical failure; electronic and mechanical.

When recovering data after a physical failure, a major hurdle is getting the correct parts to get the drive going again. A problem with hard drives is that if you have, for example, a 60GB Maxtor Hard Drive you will need another, identical, 60GB Maxtor Hard Drive to salvage parts from.

If it is the printed circuit board that has failed on your hard drive an identical circuit board is required to retrieve the necessary circuit components for replacement, because in most case it is not possible to swap the damaged circuit with the new one. Repairs of this nature require good soldering skills and a thorough knowledge of electronics to be successful.

Hard Drive Recovery Environment

You will see “Class 100 Clean Room” in a lot of advertising by hard drive recovery professionals. A Class 100 Clean Room maintains an air purity of less than 100 airborne particles over 0.5 microns in diameter in each cubic foot of air. This is to protect the sensitive internal components of hard drives. Whenever a hard drive is being worked on, a minimum of Class100 clean room should be used.

Hard Drive Recovery Time

The time taken for a hard drive recovery is usually 5-10 working days for a physical recovery (though if components are not readily available it may take weeks! ), 2-4 for a logical problem. An express service is often available, at a high price.

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The Way to Salvage Data From Physically Damaged Hard Drive

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

Article explains some points to be considered at the time of hard drive recovery. And suggested to choose best hard disk recovery software and repair services for damaged hard drive.

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