Performing your own Data Recovery?


by Sean Oderkirk - Date: 2007-02-09 - Word Count: 662 Share This!

Your sitting in front of a black screen, you know something should be happening but its not. Maybe you get an error that you hard drive cannot be found, maybe it's the repetitive clicking noise coming from your desktop tower or laptop. Either way you know that your spreadsheets, tax information, emails and family photos are in there and, you can't get at them. What do you do? Before performing your own data recovery read this informative article, it may just save you a lot of heartache.

There are a lot of forums and information on the internet. There are some who sound like they are experienced data recovery technicians, some of them have even been successful! Maybe, just maybe, you can even fix it yourself! It can't hurt to try, can it? What's the worst that can happen if I try replacing the ATA controller board? Best case scenario - the drive once again spins up maybe you can even get some information off of it. Worst case - incompatible firmware can cause the drive to try to repair itself, writing invalid information to the drive platters and leaving the drive unable to initiate ever again. No amount of recovery attempts or the most experienced recovery technicians will be able to get it back, why? There is only one device that holds the information and has the ability to read from a hard drive. What is it? Why itself of course, it doesn't matter if you find the exact same parts to replace within the drive, what matters is that the drive no longer has the information needed to direct the other components to what cylinder, track, and sector locations are required. So what would a data recovery company do differently? They will have a skillfully trained staff with the equipment necessary to find proper replacement parts and rebuild the information necessary to ensure the quality of data that is so desperately being sought after.

"Maybe I'll just have a look inside..." FREEZE! Again such a task can cause infinite damage to the recoverability of the hard drive. It takes only one minute particle of dust to jeopardize the integrity of the internal components. Lets just look at a couple of reasons one might look inside a drive AND why they shouldn't; 1. "Could one internal component be blocking others from performing their tasks?" Hard drives are built for one purpose, storing and accessing data. There are no internal components that the drive can run without. If something has broken off it needs to be replaced in a minimum Class 100 clean room. 2. "Hard drive sounds like it is trying to spin..." Spindle seizure isn't very common; usually this is the result of some other problems with firmware or internal components. Trying to "rock" or "spin" the platters will do nothing but damage the "heads" (chips on the arm used to read from the platters) or alternatively the heads will scratch the platters which will cause irrecoverable damage. Not forgetting that dust, fingerprints, and any other foreign object is enough to damage read/write heads, or worse the platters containing the relevant data.

The main problem with trying procedures found randomly on the internet or heard about through friends is that you only hear about the success stories, which are few and far between compared to the absolute horror stories. Secondly, every hard drive fails for a different reason, the circumstances may be similar but the true cause of failure is almost certain to be different. Regardless of the circumstances of the failure, 90% of hard drive failures are recoverable, it does however take someone with specialized equipment and most importantly the experience and knowledge of how hard drives both work and fail.

How important is your data to you?

Sean Oderkirk is an SEO Ghostwriter who writes for Positive E Solutions Inc Website Design and Search Engine Optimization Department for more information about Positive E Solutions Inc. or PES Hard Drive Data Recovery please follow the links.

Related Tags: data recovery, data recovery services, hard drive recovery, failed hard drive, repairing hard drives, performing data recovery

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