How to salvage Data From Your Damaged Hard Drive

A damaged hard disk drive is one of the most unpleasant types of hardware failure. No, I don't mean that a burned processor or a damaged memory block are more enjoyable. Not at all - they are also disasters and in terms of money generally it is more expensive to replace a processor than to replace a hard drive but damaged hard drives have one very irritating asset - you lose not only your hardware but also all or some of your data. Data is priceless and if you don't have a backup copy of it, then you are lost.

However, not all hard drive damages are that bad. There are cases when the hard drive is damaged but the data on it is alive. So, if your hard drive crashes, don't panic but hope for the best - i.e. The drive might have come to be an obsolete piece of machinery but at least your data is not buried inside. There are dissimilar strategies for evacuating data from a damaged hard drive and which one you can use depends on the sort of damage, as we'll see next.

Hard Drive

What Is a Damaged Hard Drive A damaged hard drive come come in many flavors. In addition to that, there are many cases when the drive is not damaged but due to some presuppose the data can't be accessed. For a non-specialist all these cases might look the same - I can't access my files, so my hard drive must have gone off, while in reality the hard drive is perfectly Ok but your data is inaccessible because of some prosaic reason.

Without getting into technical details, the shortest (and hardly most precise) explanation of a thoroughly damaged hard drive is that this hard drive can't be accessed with any means even by a great Pc technician. So, unless you are a Pc technician yourself, you can't decree on your own if the hard drive is totally dead or not. However, since there are many cases when a drive is still alive but it can't be accessed due to a collection of reasons (most frequently software issues) you can try some of the approaches in the next section and see if they work. Even if they don't work, they will do no harm, but this does not mean you shouldn't be cautious when applying them.

What You Can Do on Your Own One of the cases when the hard drive is not physically damaged but is unaccessible due to software reasons is when the partition on which the data resides is inaccessible, or at least not from your operating system. In this case you can use an alternative operating system, for instance a Live Cd with a Linux distribution and see if you will have more luck accessing the partition. This will work, if the partition table on your computer is not totally messed up. If you see that the data is still unaccessible, don't endeavor to mess up with the partition table because you can make things worse. Instead, hurry up and find a Pc technician and pray that he or she will be able to recover your data for you.

Another case when the data might still be alive is when the drive has been formatted on a high level. If the drive has been formatted on a low level, the removal techniques will not work because the data has been physically destroyed. There are many tools to unformat a formatted drive. Most of the tools are paid ones but you can find free as well. Hiren's Boot Cd comes with a bundle of data rescue tools and I generally prefer to use them than any other tools.

Software problems are coarse but hardware problems - I.e. Bad sectors or a damaged controller are also not an exception. Unfortunately, there isn't much you can do about them. If data is sucked by a bad sector, then in 99% of the cases it is gone for good. The 1% stands for the rare opportunity that you have made copies of exactly this file and the copy is not on a bad sector but this is absolutely a lucky exception. You can take the hard drive to a aid but it is unlikely that they will be able to do much.

Another technique you can try on your own without risk to make the damage more severe is to go to your Hdd manufacturer's site and see if they furnish retrieval tools. Regularly hard drive manufacturers furnish diagnostic tools but if you are lucky, chances are that you will find a data retrieval tool as well. Very often the diagnostic tools themselves not only check for problems but they also can fix some issues, so they could help you save your data as well.

The above mentioned techniques to excerpt data from a damaged hard drive are only a small fraction of what can be done. However, many of the other techniques are more complicated and they do require some knowledge about a hard drive's architecture, so I wouldn't recommend you to apply them because you can make a lot of damage. Some of the techniques that require opportunity the computer case or messing with the parts of the disk itself are too perilous to try at home. No, you will hardly destroy your home but you can absolutely added damage the hard drive, development it impossible even for a technician to help you. Additionally, you can void the warranty for the computer system, which is hardly what you want to achieve.

Take the Hard Drive to a Pc Technician If you have tried to rescue the data from your hard drive on your own to no avail, you have no selection but to take it to a service. A Pc aid has more tool than the appropriate user and there is a opportunity they will be able to help you but still, don't expect miracles. In some cases data removal services could be free of charge, especially if you have bought the hard drive from them and the warranty has not expired yet but in other cases you will have to pay.

As you probably guess, fees vary. As a rule, the cost depends on the volume of data that needs to be extracted but generally it does not cost a fortune - you might be able find somebody to do it for around 0. Still, if your drive has serious corporeal damages, even if you go to a more expensive data rescue lab, there is no guarantee that your data can and will be restored.

Skilled Pc technicians have more tools and techniques and their disposal. If you are curious in contacting a reputable company, try the aid listed below. If you would like to learn more about hard drive data rescue techniques, here is a good article: www.wikihow.com/Recover-a-Dead-Hard-Disk. Some of the information in these articles might be useful to diagnose the problem, but don't even think of applying the techniques on your own. It is absolutely risky!

How to salvage Data From Your Damaged Hard Drive